Digital Mundane

Smart citizens and social change

[digitalmundane-blog]

Culture/Nature: Somewhere adrift between synthesis and imbroglio

These were the readings for the fourth week of Key Concepts in Human Geography:

Anderson, K. (2014). Mind over matter? On decentring the human in Human Geography. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 3–18.

Glacken, C. J. (1999). Reflections on the history of western attitudes to nature. In A. Buttimer & L. Wallin (Eds.), Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 1–17.

Le Billon, P. (2001). The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography, 20(5), 561–584.

Smith, N. (2008). The Production of Nature. In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 368–401.

My response takes up where last week’s reseponse finished.

Like the binary of Man/Woman that I discussed last week with reference to Gillian Rose (1993), the Culture/Nature binary can be understood as a structure which shapes wys we think about the world. Indeed Rose sees the two as closely linked, with Man being analogical to Culture, and Woman, Nature, or that which is to be desired and/or overcome. More so than many other structuring mechanisms, the Culture/Nature (or Society/Nature[1]) binary has been of considerable interest to human geography. Perhaps this is, as Whatmore (2002, 2) has suggested, because the discipline as a whole stakes its identity on the interface between these two realms. Through their approach to Culture/Nature different philosophies reveal a lot about how they understand the discipline’s key concepts. In this reflection I will offer a standard postmodern problematisation of binary thinking, explore Marxist approaches to its resolution through the dialectic, and finish with a discussion of how Actor-Network Theory (ANT) tips the whole mess on its head. I will endeavour to reflect on how these in turn might formulate a spatial politics.

Modernist thought is in many ways grounded in the demarcation of mind from body. This supposition carries the logic of Modernity. First, it supports the ontotheological assumption that humans are distinct from and therefore above the constraints of the environments which they inhabit. It further engenders an extension of the binary into other domains of life. Culture is separated from Nature, Technology from Society, Man from Woman, Colonist from Native, Capitalist from Worker, and so on. Finally, this serves the epistemological role of allowing observations made about the world to be generalised beyond their immediate spatial and temporal frame. The dyadic logic of binary thinking underpins European Imperialism, the project of the Enlightenment and much of the grand narratives of Western thought: liberalism, traditional Marxism, (social) Darwinism, logical positivism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structuralism, etc. In short, the Cartesian extraction of Man from Nature is a god-trick which finds its apotheosis in the mid-twentieth century image of the astronaut floating above the earth, swathed only in (his) technology (Haraway 1991, 151). Postmodern approaches which do away with the demarcation of mind and body typically refocus their attention on situated knowledges; that is, particular and local instances of phenomena.

In an acknowledgement to this critique—and to the growing realisation that continuous capital accumulation was effecting ecological crisis—Marxist geography in the 1980s set about incorporating nature into its schema. While many authors participated in the greening of Marxism, this week’s reading by Neil Smith (2008), a chapter from his 1984 book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, was an early and notable contribution. For Smith, the dualism between Culture and Nature arises in both scientific and poetic conceptions of the world. These are, he argues, bourgeois constructs which help to perpetuate the interests of capitalism (Phillips 2008, 72). By contrast, Smith addresses the relationship between society and nature through a close reading of the works of Karl Marx. Smith dissolves this binary through a socio-natural synthesis conceived in both abstract and concrete terms (Smith 2008, Phillips 2008). In the abstract, production in general is a natural and universal phenomenon. External nature, or first nature, is appropriated to productive processes and by them transformed. Through production for exchange, the use values of first nature are transformed into the exchange values of second nature. The natural world is henceforth produced by social processes and in turn acts to reproduce social reality. More concretely, capitalist production engenders a wage–labour relation wherein workers, alienated from the means of production, are exploited by capitalists for the extraction of surplus value. Once more, the political economy is structured by, and in turn acts to reproduce, second nature. With the concept of second nature, Smith dissolves the Culture/Nature binary and allows both human and non-human actors to affect capitalist production. This is a dialectical approach to overcoming Culture/Nature in which capitalism constructs space and is to be found in its every scale.

By referring to a first and second nature, Smith is insisting on the distinction between nature in the abstract and nature in the material; between the ideal, pristine nature of use values, and the real, socially produced nature of exchange values (Smith 2008, 391). Swyngedouw (1996) sees this as paradoxical. While he agrees that second nature is a syncretic socio-natural whole, insisting on nature as socially produced implies that nature is ostensibly conceived through social relations. Consequently, “nature itself belongs to the ‘pure’ domain of the natural and physical world and becomes just ‘tainted’ and ‘transformed’ by the social” (Swyngedouw 1996, 96). Put another way, Society and Nature bring to their synthesis a different ontological weighting. For ANT, this ontological unevenness is problematic. Rather than see second nature as socially produced, ANT understands the world to be made up of entities—human, nonhuman or hybrids thereof—whose agency produces the effects which are subsequently interpreted as being social or natural. Society and nature are caught up in an indistinguishable imbroglio. Latour (2005, 13) locates the split between these two modes of thought to an argument instrumental to the formation of the social sciences. While Émile Durkheim understood the social as an all-encompassing entity which acts to ensure regional and national stability, Gabriel Tarde argued that the concretisation of society is a result of the relations between things. As such, “every thing is a society and… all things are societies” (Tarde, cited in Latour 2005, 14). Historically, this argument was won by Durkheim, a contingency which determined the focus of sociological enquiry thereafter. Latour and many others working with ANT believe this was a mistake. Instead they implore researchers to trace the connections between things. Cartesian binaries are dissolved, “[rendering] the social world as flat as possible in order to ensure that the establishment of any new link is clearly visible” (Latour 2005, 16). Thus it is through relations between actants (agentive human and/or nonhuman actors) in networks, that society (or culture) emerge. This is not necessarily a local or global phenomenon. Rather, scale is specific to the actor-network under examination.

Given the substantial theoretical and methodological differences between ANT and Durkheimian social science, many within the former simply ignore the latter. Anderson’s contribution to the literature (2014) is to encourage cultural geographers using ANT to engage with the humanism—or human exceptionalism—inherent in the sub-discipline and to treat it as a subtle but historically situated “mix of ideas, practices and technologies” (Anderson 2014, 3).

While efforts have been made to bring Marxism and ANT together (Swyngedouw 1996, Castree 2002), their conflict is far from resolved (and is perhaps unresolvable). At the moment I’m leaning more towards the ANT side of the fence simply because even weaker versions of Marxism seem to demand a priori stress on social forces. While I’ve not bought wholly into ANT, it seems more logical to adopt its anti-foundationalism, and then incorporate concepts from Marxism, than attempt to do things the other way around. When it comes to understanding geography, I am also rather fond of ANT’s approach to the problem of scale: it seems to be a good fit to the multidimensional regimes of governance which operate through software.

Notes

Strictly speaking, I do not wish to conflate Culture with Society, however from the perspective of the philosophical separation of humanity from the natural world, they serve the same purpose.

References

Anderson, K. (2014). Mind over matter? On decentring the human in Human Geography. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 3–18.

Castree, N. (2002). False Antitheses? Marxism, Nature and Actor-Networks. Antipode, 34(1), 111–146.

Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillips, M. (2008). Uneven Development (1984): Neil Smith. In P. Hubbard, R. Kitchin, & G. Valentine (Eds.), Key Texts in Human Geography. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. pp. 71–81.

Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Smith, N. (2008). The Production of Nature. In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 368–401.

Swyngedouw, E. (1996). The City As a Hybrid: On Nature, Society and Cyborg Urbanization. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 7(2), 65–80.

Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. London: Sage Publications.

[digitalmundane-blog]

The hegemony of masculine knowledge-making

These were the readings for the third week of my Key Concepts in Human Geography course.

Agnew, J. (2010). Ethics or militarism? The role of the AAG in what was originally a dispute over informed consent. Political Geography, 29(8), 422–423.

Bryan, J. (2010). Force multipliers: Geography, militarism, and the Bowman Expeditions. Political Geography, 29(8), 414–416.

Cruz, M. (Kiado). (2010). A living space: The relationship between land and property in the community. Political Geography, 29(8), 420–421.

Gould, P. (1979). Geography 1957–1977: The Augean Period. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 69(1), 139–151.

Herlihy, P. H. (2010). Self-appointed gatekeepers attack the American Geographical Society’s first Bowman Expedition. Political Geography, 29(8), 417–419.

Hudson, B. (2008). The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918. In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 140–153.

Rose, G. (1993). No Place for Women? In Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 41–61.

Steinberg, P. E. (2010). Professional ethics and the politics of geographic knowledge: The Bowman Expeditions. Political Geography, 29(8), 413.

Rather than follow the historical narrative of empire within geography, I instead chose to focus my response on the first four chapters of Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. The course organiser has recommended that I read the following discussion of the book:

Duncan, N., Domosh, M., & Rose, G. (2004). Classics in human geography revisited. Progress in Human Geography, 28(3), 363–368.

Here is my response, written before I completed reading the book.

There is sometimes a point, midway through a good crime fiction novel, where the person I had thought to be guilty turns out to be (most likely) innocent. This is an exciting moment. Initial suspicions have been denied but the suspense persists. I start thinking in other directions, turning different possibilities over in my head. But this is also a moment which establishes an expectation for what is to follow. Will I be thrilled to discover something new and unexpected? Or disappointed to find my initial suspect found guilty after all?

Having not read more than the first four chapters of Feminism and Geography, I feel as if I’m exactly at that moment. This is probably not too surprising to anyone familiar with the book’s structure. The opening chapter establishes the minority signifier of the Same/Other gender binary: the “imagined feminine Woman” (Rose 1993, 11). Chapters two and three use this to underscore Rose’s devastating critique of time-geography and humanistic geography respectively. The first is portrayed as conceiving of space in Cartesian terms. Movement is managed without bodies and knowledge formed without emotion. This is a geography which ignores Woman in favour of masculine rationality. By contrast the second—humanistic geogrpahy—is intrigued by Woman and sets out to uncover a geography of emotion and meaning. Humanistic (phenomenological and existential) approaches conceive of place not in its particularities, but in its universal essences. This erases Woman by making embodied experience a domain of masculine knowledge-making. In the fourth chapter, the concern that I had with Rose’s deconstruction of geography was raised and deftly sidestepped. Surely, I had assumed, by positioning her critique within the Same/Other binary Rose was also serving to reify its power. While my concern was granted, the affirmation of Same/Other was revealed to have been for the purpose of strategic critique, made from a consciously shifting and oscillating subject position. In the pages that remain her, Rose has promised to elaborate “a different kind of knowledge by drawing on different theorizations of different experiences” (Rose 1993, 85). I’m at the hinge of the book and I’m keen to dive back in and see where it takes me.

In this mid-point reflection, I want to describe in greater depth the character of my initial critique, partly as a way of trying to think through what I found to be suspicious. To do this I will: describe in more detail Rose’s logic of the binary-imaginary; suggest that this leads to a strategic essentialism which moves Rose philosophically from poststructuralism towards pragmatism; and conclude with a bit of speculation about where Rose might be going.

The Same/Other binary, which is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, functions as a dyadic logic wherein each part, Same and Other, is defined in relation to the other. Same, or Man, is understood as having a concrete identity only through its distinction to Other, or Woman. Gendered difference is therefore socially constructed but still able to affect world through the performativity of its subject positions (see Butler 1990). Importantly, Same/Other is not an equal relationship; Same is always in a position of domination to the Other on which it depends. Rose applies this logic to more areas of life than Man/Woman. Culture/Nature also acts as a binary which structures knowledge. Similarly the difference between conceptual and grounded research (Rose 1993, 74):

theory – empirics general – specific abstract – concrete nomological – contextualising

The binary logic is also be applied to Rose’s critique of time-geography and humanistic geography (modified from Rose 1993, 75):

time geography – humanistic geography social-scientific – aesthetic rational – emotional space – place public – private social – body knowledge – emotion transparent – opaque

While Same/Other operates as a dyadic pair, it is also possible to read down each of the columns listed above. The left column can be loosely conceived of as representing masculine characteristics and the right as representing feminine characteristics.

As these binaries are taken to be socially constructed the question then arises: why is Rose so adamant in structuring her arguments around them? Rose’s critique of time geography is founded on its inherent masculinity. Her critique of humanistic geography on the other hand, is founded on a masculinity produced through an engagement with the feminine. These would seem to be inconsistent positions and “in some way complicit with the geographical discourse… engaged” (Rose 1993, 82). That is, by affirming the binary of Man/Woman, she is in fact reinforcing its hegemony. For Rose, this inconsistency is resolved through a “[refusal] to make a choice between two strategies” (Rose 1993, 83). As masculine knowledge-making acts at diverse capacities and scales, so too must its points resistance. Similarly her complicity with Man/Woman is positioned as a strategic attempt to face masculinity head on so as to “undermine the authority of the Same by seeking out the incoherences of its supposedly singular and stable position” (Rose 1993, 84). Her critiques do not confirm Man/Woman, because Rose is not asserting that they are real. Instead, her attack on geography is a strategic essentialism: “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Spivak 1988, 13). Choosing a position primarily for its instrumental function rather than its explanatory weight, seems to me like the non-essentialised logic of pragmatism more so than the poststructuralism with which Rose is typically associated[1].

I want to conclude by reflecting on two possible directions in which Rose might be headed. These are based on my admittedly rather limited knowledge of feminist political theory. The first is the ontological trick of J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) in which the rejection of the hegemonic binary of liberalism/socialism (or capitalism/communism) forms the basis for an exploration of alternative economic geographies. Applied to Rose’s work, a denial of the hegemony of masculine knowledge-making would not act in direct opposition to the dominations of Woman, but rather in parallel to them; not as a counter-hegemony but as an alter-hegemonic project. This would involve a recognition of the various and variegated ways in which bodies and subjectivities are gendered. The problem with this approach is that it fails to oppose the very real power dynamics which do operate through gender. The second is the epistemic commitment of intersectionality (Valentine 2007), wherein gender is not held to be above other sites of political contestation (such as class, race, sexuality, age and disability) but entangled with them. This might allow for more subtle and situated oppositions to masculine knowledge-making within the academy. Intersectionality does not offer a robust conceptual framework however, and so might not allow for the forms of engagement which Rose is adopting. I’m aware that both of these ideas were developed after Feminism and Geography, but it may be possible to find traces of them in the work. Whatever Rose goes with, I’m certain that it will be provocative and stimulating.

There is a risk in addressing only part of someone’s argument. It becomes easy to reduce their views and portray a caricature their position. Trying to write a response to a half-read book is, as such, something of a challenge—my reaction to the work is still quite open and shifting. I’m not entirely uncomfortable with this position. It seems like I’m here a lot. I guess I’ll have to let you know what I really think when I’m done.

Notes

I find it problematic that there is a concept designed to absolve academics from any potential (in)action inherent to their theorising—it sounds an awful lot like a cop-out to me. Given however that strategic essentialism is borrowed from postcolonial studies, it is probably a mode of public engagement which I would want to analyse at greater depth before critiquing more formally.

References

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The End Of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography. In R. Guha & G. C. Spivak (Eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–32.

Valentine, G. (2007). Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography. The Professional Geographer, 59(1), 10–21.

[new-aesthetic]

Then, a funny thing happened. One night, a couple of years ago, I was in an Uber SUV in NYC, headed to Penn Station to catch the train to Washington DC when I got a text message from a tech socialite of sorts (I’ll spare her name because Gawker has already parodied her enough), but she’s someone I hardly know, asking me if I was in an Uber car at 33th and 5th (or, something like that). I replied that I was indeed, thinking that she must be in an adjacent car. Looking around, she continued to text with updates of my car’s whereabouts, so much so that I asked the driver if others could see my Uber location profile? “No,” he replied, “that’s not possible.”

At that point, it all just started to feel weird, until finally she revealed that she was in Chicago at the launch of Uber Chicago, and that the party featured a screen that showed where in NYC certain “known people” (whatever that means) were currently riding in Uber cabs. After learning this, I expressed my outrage to her that the company would use my information and identity to promote its services without my permission. She told me to calm down, and that it was all a “cool” event and as if I should be honored to have been one of the chosen.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Can We Trust Uber? — Medium

[digitalmundane-blog]

Normative geographies or geographies of normativity?

The first week of Key Concepts in Human Geography addresses the question: what is geography? The readings were:

Bonnett, A. (2003). Geography as the world discipline: connecting popular and academic geographical imaginations. Area, 35(1), 55–63.

Buttimer, A. (1982). Musing on Helicon: Root metaphors and geography. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 64(2), 89–96.

Kitchin, R., Linehan, D., O’Callaghan, C., & Lawton, P. (2013). Public geographies through social media. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3(1), 56–72.

Kropotkin, P. (2008). What Geography Ought To Be? In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 11–22.

I’m a little wary of being told what I ‘ought’ to do, what I ‘ought’ to research or what geography ‘ought’ to be about. It’s not that I’m immune to thinking hypothetically about how things might be different, but rather that for me, the discussion must always turn to the place and politics of the person telling me what ‘ought’ to occur. Most of this week’s papers left me with more questions than answers. Are problems of power and domination really reducible to a pedagogical solution—resting solely upon the conviction that humankind is essentially good (Kropotkin 2008)? Is there really a ‘we’ to academic geography which is unified in its disdain or disregard for popular geography (Bonnett 2003, 61)? Does anyone, Swedish or otherwise, really have the legitimacy to speak in sweeping terms on hur världen skulle vara (Buttimer 1982, 94)?

According to Barnes (2009), it has been common since the quantitative turn for economic geographers to draw a distinction between positive claims and normative theory. The purpose of this distinction is largely instrumental. Positive claims about economic theory are held to be falsifiable and therefore scientific. This engenders in economists—and in their audience—the feeling that research is real and true. By contrast, normative ideals and aspirations are not able to be proven false. As such they concern a different domain of life than science: politics. By cleanly insulating their research from the political realm, economic geographers are able to transition easily from one mode of engagement to another (see table 1 in Kitchin (2013, 58) for a breakdown of how these two modes of instrumental knowledge function). Ostensibly the practice of truth-making is held to effect policy recommendations, but not at the cost of liberal democratic values.

The clarity of this distinction and the authority which it legitimates can be attacked from both directions; undermining the clarity of either its positive or normative sides.

Firstly, positive theory is always already normative. Research within Science and Technology Studies has shown that the practice of science is messy, relational, contextual, and dependent upon assumptions, idealisations and simplifications about how the world works (for further elaboration see Sismondo 2010). Economic geographers, to continue with the example, make use of equations and models which presuppose axioms that the world ‘ought’ to be wholly knowable and ‘ought’ to follow the patterns that it has done so in the past. These logics—naturalism and induction—are both crucial to the functioning normal science and are both founded on normative beliefs. Suggesting that falsifiable, positive research is somehow free from the politics of normativity is to present an ungrounded opinion of how science itself ‘ought’ to work.

Second, any normative claim relies in its enunciation upon a position of objective-seeming authority. The positive/normative binary is nothing less than an attempt to bracket-off political statements from the power relations which allow them to be declared. As Foucault (1972) has argued, the position of any authority exceeds the capabilities of the individual who comes to occupies it. The perception of that subject position’s legitimacy is in fact dependent upon an assortment of complex relational norms, techniques and knowledge regimes. Pronouncements of the economic geographer are nothing without academic trappings and the feelings of reality and truth engendered by science. Put another way, every normative claim is also a claim to and/or a perpetuation of power.

When told what ‘ought’ to be done, it can be useful, I think, to deconstruct and attempt to place that which has been said. Statements about how certain futures might be made actionable in the present invariably have their own anticipatory logics and geographical referents (Anderson 2010). Thinking about and unpacking what these may be and what forms of power they may represent could then form a nucleus of appropriate response. To be effective, such a response must be particular to the normative claims being made.

What then becomes of the imperative for political action: what is to be done! Does abandoning normativity mean abandoning the struggle for something different? Not necessarily.

Many camps within geography—although typically those working with the “root metaphor” of the world as “an ‘arena’ of events” (Buttimer 1982, 91)—have grappled with these problems. For example, feminist approaches to the discipline have outlined how geographers might both think about and practice a spatially embodied knowledge (Rose 1997, Gibson-Graham 2003). Such an approach might involve cycles of critical self-reflection and participatory research design wherein the geographer attempts to develop knowledge which is both powerful and empowering. This is a long way removed from Harvey’s image (as cited in Bonnett 2003, 61) of geography as the “preserve” of academics. Rather than the authoritative, godlike academic bestowing upon research subjects the pearls of his wisdom, instead a normative imagination is developed through hopeful collaboration between equals.

I’m not immune to imagining how the world might be different. In fact, I think hopeful futures are a necessary precondition for left-wing political agency. But framing imaginaries as an ‘ought’ is, I think, deeply problematic.

References

Anderson, B. (2010). Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 34(6), 777–798.

Barnes, T. J. (2009). Normative theory. In D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. J. Watts, & S. Whatmore (Eds.), The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 505–506.

Bonnett, A. (2003). Geography as the world discipline: connecting popular and academic geographical imaginations. Area, 35(1), 55–63.

Buttimer, A. (1982). Musing on Helicon: Root metaphors and geography. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 64(2), 89–96.

Foucault, M. (1972). Archaeology of Knowledge. (A. M. Smith Sheridan, Trans.). London and New York: Routledge.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2003). An ethics of the local. Rethinking Marxism, 15(1), 49–73.

Kitchin, R., Linehan, D., OCallaghan, C., & Lawton, P. (2013). Public geographies through social media. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3(1), 56– 72.

Kropotkin, P. (2008). What Geography Ought To Be? In H. Bauder & S. E. Mauro (Eds.), Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings. Kelowna: Praxis (e)Press. pp. 11–22.

Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), 305–320.

Sismondo, S. (2010). An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (Second Edition). Chichester: Blackwell.

[digitalmundane-blog]

September is past. The second year of my PhD has begun and I’m taking a course called Key Concepts in Human Geography. Part of the assessment of this course is a weekly response to the readings. I will be posting these every Friday starting today.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Hailo, Uber and the deregulation of Ireland’s taxi industry

Reblogged from The Programmable City:

This afternoon’s black cab blockade of London comes in response to car ride apps that are changing the character of the city’s taxi industry. While there has been little visible backlash against comparable services in Ireland, it seems only a matter of time before these struggles find their way to our shores.

The market-leading smart phone taxi service in Ireland is Hailo. Self-described as “the evolution of the hail”, Hailo was founded in November 2011 by three London taxi drivers and three entrepreneurs. It launched in Dublin, its second city, in July 2012 and as of mid-2014, provides sporadic coverage across the country with a specific attention on areas of high population density.

To use Hailo as a potential passenger, one needs simply to download and launch their free smart phone application. To use the Hailo as a driver, things are a little more complicated. One must sign up using a geographically specific online portal (such as exists for London, Ireland, New York, Boston and Tokyo). Registration is restricted to licensed taxi drivers such that Hailo is effectively leveraging the screening procedures of existing small public service vehicle (SPSV) infrastructure in Ireland. Of Dublin’s 12,000 registered taxi drivers, I’ve been told that about half are using the service.

In this post I will describe two observations on the role Hailo plays in Dublin: that it competes with existing taxi infrastructure, and that it capitalises on and potentially extends the deregulation of transportation in the city. I will briefly compare the service to Uber and Lyft, and argue why their competition will likely bring the taxi wars to Dublin.

Hailo competes with existing taxi infrastructure

In addition to plying for hire (being in motion and available for hire) and standing for hire (being stationary and available for hire), taxi drivers can increase their number of fares by enrolling to a radio service. When a customer phones a taxi company, this company then leverages its radio-enabled network to source an available taxi driver. Cab drivers working in Dublin have told me that subscription to such a service can cost as much as €5,000 per year. This service is dependent upon a radio communications unit being physically installed into driver’s vehicle, the hire of which is presumably incorporated into the cost of the service.

Hailo, in drawing upon already existing smart phone usage, does not need to install any radio communications infrastructure. This means lower fixed capital costs and lower associated installation and maintenance costs. Furthermore, by having software perform the role of the radio operator, there are presumably fewer attendant labour costs.

These factors lead to a considerably different pricing model. Rather than charge a yearly subscription fee, Hailo is free to install and use, but charges a 12% commission on every fare sourced through the application. In order to compete with these rates, a €5,000 per year radio service would need to direct €41,667 worth of fares to each driver. Understandably, Hailo poses a considerable threat to Dublin’s taxi radio companies.

There is however an important geographical caveat which needs to be made. In cities such as Dublin – where there is a confluence of high population density, a high number of taxis per head and a high usage of smart phones – the benefits of Hailo to both drivers and passengers outweigh those offered by taxi radio companies. In a geographical location where taxi or smart phone use is more sparsely distributed however, Hailo has less opportunity to draw upon existing infrastructure. Where I work in Maynooth – a small university town 20 kilometres west of Dublin – it is very difficult to find a taxi using Hailo. In such locations both spatial scarcity and community loyalty lead me to suppose far less competition between Hailo and existing taxi radio services. In these instances, the volume of jobs rather than rate of commission is the important factor.

Competing SPSV smart phone service Uber, which has been recently valued at a truly astounding $18.2bn[note 1], launched in Dublin in January 2014. Uber operates under a business model which is far more challenging to existing taxi infrastructures as a whole. Rather than recruit taxi drivers exclusively, Uber is open to private hire vehicle (or limousine) drivers as well. Less regulation on the cost of limousine services allows the company to employ a surge pricing model, so that fares can cost considerably more than a standard rate (up to as much as eight times more expensive in rare incidences of peak demand). The cost of an SPSV licence for limousines in Ireland is only €250, compared to the €6,300 for a taxi licence. While cars must still be deemed as fit for such a purpose, and drivers must similarly undergo clearance by An Garda Síochána, Uber hopes that its matchmaking infrastructure for limousine services will allow its service to compete favourably with the taxi industry as a whole. It’s probably too soon to draw any conclusions on the success of the company in Dublin, but you can be sure they are here for the long run. Uber have money to burn and their CEO Travis Kalanick has a combative attitude toward vested interests.

Hailo capitalises on and potentially extends the deregulation of transportation in the city

As described above Hailo is most effective in urban areas where there is already considerable competition amongst taxi drivers. Uptake amongst drivers is dependent upon a pull effect, whereby not using the service would render them excluded from a proportion of the passenger market. There is, as such, a supply-and-demand-like positive feedback loop between the driver and passenger applications. Increased use of the application by one group would be expected to result in an increase in use by the other.

It was not always so easy to hail a taxi in Dublin. Between 1978 and 2000 local authorities in Ireland were entitled to limit the number of taxi licences issued in their area. In Dublin, the number of licences in circulation between 1978 and 1988 was fixed at 1,800. This number was increased slowly through the late 1980s and 1990s to around 2,800 by the end of the decade. Supply was not kept up with demand however. By the late 1990s the cost of purchasing a licence on the open market was as much as €100,000. In line with its commitment to improving Dublin’s taxi services, the Action Programme for the Millennium encouraged the issuance of 3,100 new licences in the city in November 1999. This was not found to be enough however, as one year later, on November 21, 2000, S.I No. 367/2000[note 2] lifted licensing regulations in Ireland. This had the immediate effect of devaluing existing licences and subsequent enquiries and legal cases have been undertaken to assess the fairness of this deregulation. The change has had its intended effect however. By 2008, union estimates placed the number of taxi licences nationwide at 19,000 with 12,000 of those being held in Dublin. Locals tell me that these days it is much easier to get a cab home after a night out than it was in the 1990s.

Under conditions where taxi drivers do not have to compete so vigorously for fares (under a licence-restricted, consortium-based or heavily unionised model rather than the predominantly individualised system currently in operation in Ireland), there would be little pressure for them to use Hailo. And as I’ve already argued, no drivers using the service would translate to no passengers using it either. Indeed it is quite clear from various interviews and media appearances that Hailo have made tactical decisions about how and in which cities they introduce their service.

While Hailo takes advantage of such spaces of deregulation, it has been careful so far to adhere to local legislation. The service does not on its own necessitate a further deregulation of the SPSV sector in Ireland. Hailo is not unique however. Competitors include the globe-spanning Uber, Lyft, Sidecar, Wingz, Summon and Flywheel in the USA, cab:app, Cab4Now, Get Taxi and Kabbee in London and Chauffeur-Privé in France. These transportation network companies compete on a range of business models, services and geographical coverage. This marketplace of competing car ride apps has the potential to push against regulations which are in place to control regional SPSV sectors in Ireland.

Consider the following examples from what’s been called the taxi wars.

Since March 2014, Republican Senator Marco Rubio has been pushing for the deregulation of the limousine industry in Miami, Florida specifically to make way for the introduction of Uber. The taxi and limousine industry in Miami-Dade county is strongly regulated. The industry caters to a population of over 2,500,000 people through 2,121 taxi medallions (which is the equivalence of a vehicle licence in Ireland). This has forced the market price of a medallion to around $340,000, 28% of which are owned by taxi drivers. Similarly, limousines licences are limited to 625 in number. Services must be booked an hour in advance with rides costing a minimum of $70. This regulation is directly restrictive of Uber’s business model. After Senator Rubio’s efforts to clear the company’s way stalled, actor Ashton Kutcher was recruited to tackle regulation from a different front, decrying the city’s bizarre, old, antiquated legislation” on Jimmy Kimmel Live. On May 22 rival company Lyft – “your friend with a car”, which adopts a decentralised ride sharing model – launched in Miami on a donation-based payment scheme. This forced a response by Uber, which launched its comparably modelled UberX service in the city on June 4. These are not isolated events. Similar changes are being forced on other regions of the US such as: Arlington, Virginia; San Antonio, California; and Austin, Texas.

Uber arrived in London, it’s first European city, in mid-2012. London’s taxi industry consists of over 25,000 hackney carriage taxis serving a daytime population of around 10,000,000. In order to obtain a taxi licence, or Green Badge, drivers must pass to a knowledge test covering a 113 square mile area of the city which is purported to require up to five years of study. Uber, in accepting any driver with a private hire vehicle licence, poses a clear threat to the time and money that London’s taxi drivers have invested in their profession. In recent weeks, The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association has summoned six Uber drivers to court, alleging that the Uber smartphone app is equivalent to a taximeter and therefore illegal under the 1998 Private Hire Act which reserves that right for licensed taxi drivers. In addition, the London taxi-driver’s union lambast Transport for London for failing to pursue the illegal activities which Uber facilitate, suggesting that the state body is afraid of the money backing Uber. In response, Transport for London has sought a binding decision from the high court regarding the legality of the smart phone taximeter.

The way in which other transportation network companies have responded to Uber’s entrance into the London market is important in the case of Ireland. Hailo have announced that they will extend their services to private hire vehicles in addition to taxis. This was news was not well accepted by the industry, with the word ‘scabs’ being gratified on the wall of Hailo’s London office. The company responded on their website, insisting that they are simply following consumer demand. Assuming the move doesn’t too badly damage its position among existing service users, we can expect to see something similar in Ireland, either to pre-empt or combat Uber’s growing market share. Not all apps are going the way of private vehicle hire however. Competitor Cab:app has pushed back against the trend set by Uber and Hailo, asserting publicly its commitment to the taxi industry.

Protests in London and throughout Europe today (June 11, 2014) are in direct opposition to Uber’s perceived infringement upon the taxi industry. In the past, strike action has escalated to involve the destruction of property. In January 2014, Parisian taxi drivers struck in opposition to Uber’s unregulated market competition. Confrontations between unionised taxi drivers and Uber drivers resulted in “Smashed windows, tires, vandalized vehicle[s], and bleeding hands”.

The Irish SPSV sector is admittedly quite different from comparable industries in America, the UK and France. Hailo does not face the same kind of regulatory barriers in Ireland as it would in parts of the US. The National Taxi Drivers’ Union is less powerful than taxi unions in London, and certainly less militant than those in Paris. Hailo is a relatively well behaved company in this sector however. As competitors such as Uber and Lyft seek to expand their more aggressive strategies throughout Europe, it is highly likely, given the success of Hailo and Dublin’s reputation as a high-tech-friendly city, that a real push will be made to establish a foothold in Ireland. Spokesperson for Uber’s international operations Anthony El-Khoury has told the Irish Times: “We see a lot of potential in the Irish market and a lot of demand”. As this market heats up, pressure to further deregulate the SPSV industry will be put on Dublin City Council and the Irish government.

The future of the SPSV sector in Ireland

These two preliminary observations on the role of Hailo in Dublin are commensurate with larger tendencies of state deregulation and market-oriented competition. While the emergence of car ride apps may be positioned as a form of Schumpeterian creative-destruction, there are larger political and economic forces within which these applications should be contextualised. I have attempted to sketch some of these forces in this blog post.

The taxi industry is regulated for a reason. The screening and approval of drivers is important in ensuring accountability and the safety of passengers. Regular metering and Ireland’s nationwide fare system (which was instituted in September 2006) make certain that taxis provide an honest and consistent service that does not gouge rural communities or those in need. While Hailo operates under a minimally challenging model to these standards, it does not exist in a vacuum. By exploiting the freer regulation of limousines, Uber is effectively side-stepping many but not all of them. By doing away with accreditation altogether, Lyft would throw these standards onto the wills of the market. Car ride apps have the potential to put huge pressure on the taxi and limousine business. If other European cities are anything to go by Ireland’s SPSV sector is likely to be forced to deregulate further in coming years. This impacts the price, availability and safety of taxi services, and undercuts the ability of workers in the industry to bargain for fair pay and work conditions. It is important that any changes to the sector be submitted to proper public scrutiny and debate.

Jim Merricks White

Footnotes

Aswath Damodaran of New York University claims that a more accurate valuation would be around $6bn. By way of comparison Hailo was valued, 18 months ago, at a far more modest $140m.[return]

Also called Road Traffic (Public Service Vehicles) (Amendment) (No. 3) Regulations 2000.[return]

[algopop]

London Black Taxi protest against Uber

Central London is currently in gridlock as black cabs are lining up along major roads to protest against Uber the ‘ride-sharing’ app. The algorithmic ride pricing provided by the app is being contested as tantamount to a taxi meter, which only black cabs are legally entitled to use in London. BBC reported this earlier:

"We have nothing against competition but we feel that Transport for London has failed Londoners by allowing Uber to operate outside the law," said Steve McNamara, of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association.

Up to 12,000 drivers are expected to take part in the protest.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Because we will need a growing cadre of data and social scientists who are able to encode critical policy values into technical infrastructure, we support investment in fields such as Science and Technology Studies which emphasize teaching scientific knowledge and technology in its social and ethical context, and the teaching of module courses to data scientists and engineers to familiarize them with the broader societal implications of their work.

Executive Office of the President. (2014). Big Data: Seizing opportunities, preserving values. Washington, DC: The White House. Accessed May 6, 2014, from http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/big_data_privacy_report_5.1.14_final_print.pdf.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Ludic Capitalism and the Public Sphere

I wrote this article as a bit of a provocation for a course I attended recently in Copenhagen. It has a lot of problems, not the the least of which that it is trying to do too much and that doesn't give enough credence to the sophisticated genealogy of work around Habermas' (and others') public sphere. My intention, really, was to play around with a whole lot of concepts in a way that was perhaps more evocative than communicatively rational. Perhaps there is something in it for someone out there. In the coming weeks I will be working on a deliverable for the course which is significantly different from what I propose here.

The playful, hyper-connected café of today is an altogether different space than the eighteenth century, learned society café described by Jürgen Habermas. In this essay proposal, I will outline why I think the structure of what Galloway has called ludic capitalism – “in which flexibility, play, creativity, and immaterial labor… have taken over from the old concepts of discipline, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and muscle” (2012, 27) – challenges the notion of the public sphere. But first, allow me to sketch an imagined Starbucks coffee experience that might be found in the so-called smart city (for an exploration and deconstruction of this concept see Hollands 2008; and, Wolfram 2012).

You enter the popular Starbucks cafeteria on Grafton Street, Dublin, and immediately notice that you are being recorded by the store’s security system. You walk to the counter, greet the smiling customer service representative (CSR), present your loyalty card and inform them of your desire for a grande low-fat vanilla latte. Your order is entered into a computer and, through the unique identifying number encoded in the magnetic strip on the back of your loyalty card, associated with your purchase history. The computer informs the CSR that you are a regular customer and so she offers you a 15% discount on a type of blueberry muffin you are known to enjoy. With a laugh, you decline, citing a need to lose weight. That will be €4.25, she says. You pay by debit and the CSR waves your Bank of Ireland card in front of a machine. The contactless transaction, which recruits a complex architecture of financial machinery, is seemingly approved instantaneously. As you wait you check your Facebook timeline on your iPhone and in the background Foursquare automatically pushes your location to the cloud – you are now the Mayor of Starbucks @ BT2, congratulations. Meanwhile in a server room on the other side of Dublin, a licensed software package runs an algorithm over the cctv footage of your visit and correlates it with your order, describing: time; purchase; gender; approximate age; (at a stretch) estimated income bracket. This information will later be collated and analysed to inform business and marketing strategy in the local area, and throughout the franchise’s national geography. Your order arrives and you sit quietly on your own, making use of the store’s free wifi to do some research for an article you are writing. You are surrounded by others, some of whom chat quietly, but many of whom, like you, are engaged in their own business.

Three inter-related features of this vignette deserve attention: code affecting space; space affecting code; and, the political economy of code/space colonising lifeworlds.

Firstly, communicative devices have changed the spatiality of the city. Varnelis and Friedberg refer to the publicness described above as a “calculated copresense” (2008, 17) in which you are together with your fellow consumers but are in a sense in another place entirely. This is a concept I would extend throughout the smart city. The use of communicative devices (such as smart phones and social media) produce a foam-like urban space in which we become culturally and spatially disconnected from those around us[1]. Contrary to what Varnelis and Friedberg argue, this does not in itself prevent the formation of public spheres. For Habermas it was not the physical space of the café which was important but rather the modes of communication and participation which it facilitated. In this sense the café is a kind of mediating socio-technical assemblage, a role which could hypothetically be filled by another mediating technology. Whether communicative devices as they are currently configured can act as a platform for bourgeois public spheres (Habermas 1991), subaltern counterpublics (Fraser 1990) and/or a proletarian publicity (Negt, Kluge and Labanyi 1988) is I think thrown into question by the second and third features of the vignette.

Secondly, the foam-phase spatiality of the smart city is in turn effecting the production of social media and the internet. Fantasies of perfectly quantifiable commercial and urban information – as represented in the video game franchise Sim City – are being normalised as a new frontier for the software industry (Kitchin 2013). This is evidence of a generalisation of the foam-phase spatiality throughout the city-scale. I contend that this spatiality is a property of and a partial precondition for the advancement of ludic capitalism. Wark (2013) describes ludic capitalism as being dependent upon the closing of the feedback loop between the collection of data and a subsequent (commercial or military) response. In the vignette elaborated above this occurs when the CSR attempts to up-sell you a discounted muffin based upon your specific order history[2]. The CSR’s dialogue options are guided by her computer interface – similar to many role-playing video games, such as the popular The Elder Scrolls or Fallout series – and so rather than communicate, you interact through “inter-autistic and mimetic relations” (Funcke & Sloterdijk 2005). It is for this reason that the supposed authenticity of affective or emotive labour is crucial to ludic capitalism. Your interaction with the Starbucks CSR is mediated by what Kitchin and Dodge (2001) refer to as a code/space. Code/spaces are bubble-like micro-spatialities produced to solve a specific problem – in this instance, what more can you be sold – and are entirely determined by correctly functioning software. Were the software application guiding the CSR to cease working properly, the code/space bubble would burst and she would be unable to offer you a discount. Before continuing, re-read the vignette and pay particular attention to the work done by code/spaces. Through their reterritorialisation in the smart city social media and the internet are being pluralised and reproduced in the foam-like spatiality which curtails genuine communication. The software-dependent structure of ludic capitalism poses a challenge to the Habermasian binaries which precede the ideal speech situation: public/private, state/public, reason/non-reason and ethics/aesthetics.

Finally, code/space extends ludic capitalism throughout the body (bio)politic. In as much as code/space concretises a competitive strategy in the generalisation the smart city, ludic capitalism is engaged in the colonisation of lifeworlds. Habermas’ metaphor of colonisation doesn’t go far enough in this instance however. A more useful way to think about the effects of ludic capitalism is through a reappropriation of the notion of the real and formal subsumption to capital. Marx (1976) used this idea to describe the way in which labour was first brought under the remit of proto-capitalist organisation – so that a coffee bean farmer might be forced to hawk their goods on the market – and then reorganised by it – rather than tend to the land, our farmer comes to tend to the machinery which tends to the land. This is signified by formal subsumption of labour and real subsumption of labour respectively. Hardt and Negri (2000) extend this idea to the subsumption of life itself. In their work, life is formally subsumed to the social factory and is overdetermined by the reproduction of the labour force. Through its real subsumption, the social bios is then brought in line with Empire (and so there remains no outside from which to oppose capital). I consider ludic capitalism, as a biopolitical regime of Empire, to be in a process of becoming, and so the formal and real subsumption of life must be seen as both intermixed and continuous. Codified representations of life are continually acquired and acted upon through automated means[3]. Thus, ludic capitalists compete to collect data, to accumulate life. This is done in three ways. (1) Through traditional surveillance (ie. by the use of the Starbucks’ cctv system). (2) Through sousveillance (ie. the use of the Starbucks’ customer loyalty card system). By offering services which act upon volunteered data in real-time, users are recruited in the subsumption of their own lifeworlds. This is nothing less than a mediated auto-exploitation. (3) Through gamification (ie. by competing to amass points and badges so that you might become the Foursquare Mayor of Starbucks @ BT2). In concealing data behind a veil of play, gamification is perhaps the definitive form of the subsumption of life under ludic capitalism. By applying Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the subsumption of life to code/space and the smart city, it is revealed that not only is life being collected in the image of computation, but so too is it being reproduced in that image. If code/space is entwined with ludic capital, what space remains for communicative rationality in any public sphere, online or offline?

Hardt and Negri (2000) contend that the immateriality of data decouples its use value from its exchange value. Value, as such, is produced through sharing. For them the management of collective potentialities (that is, commons) becomes the lens with which to rethink (counter)publics. I am not convinced[4]. In my essay I wish to develop the three features of ludic capitalism outlined in this proposal. My intention is to explore how they might effect the way in which counter publics, reconceived through commons, might be assembled, accumulated to capital, and then escape a rigidly imposed exchange value form.

Notes

The use of foam and bubbles is an appropriation of ideas developed in Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphären trilogy. For an overview of this project see Schinkel and Noordegraaf-Eelens (2011). Applying this idea to the smart city, should in turn be credited to Adam Greenfield (2013).

To my knowledge Starbucks is not currently using such a system. This example is based on an implementation used in the American supermarket chain Safeways (Clifford 2012).

As such, in the language of Kitchin and Dodge (2011), the acquisition of capta logarithmically approaches the event horizon of (full) data, just as the oligopticon approaches the panopticon.

Counterplay (Galloway 2006; Dyer-Witheford & Peuter 2009) seems to me a more consequent manner in which to contest the automated subsumption of life, within, against and beyond ludic capitalism. I am interested if and how counterplay might become counter publics.

Bibliography

Clifford, S. (2012). Supermarkets Try Customizing Prices for Shoppers. nytimes.com. Retrieved February 14, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/business/supermarkets-try-customizing-prices-for-shoppers.html.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & Peuter, G. de. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80.

Funcke, B., & Sloterdijk, P. (2005). Against Gravity: Bettina Funcke talks with Peter Sloterdijk. bookforum.com. Retrieved February 15, 2014, from http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/funcke.html.

Galloway, A. R. (2006). Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Galloway, A. R. (2012). The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity.

Greenfield, A. (2013). Public space, civilization and the self (long). speedbird.wordpress.com. Retrieved March 21, 2014, from http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/public-space-civilization-and-the-self/.

Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Hollands, R. G. (2008). Will the real smart city please stand up? City, 12(3), 303–320.

Kitchin, R. (2013). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, forthcoming.

Kitchin, R., & Dodge, M. (2011). Code/Space: Software and everyday life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marx, K. (1976). Results of the Immediate Process of Production. In B. Fowkes (Trans.), Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Books.

Negt, O., Kluge, A., & Labanyi, P. (1988). “The Public Sphere and Experience”: Selections. October, 46(Autumn), 60–82.

Schinkel, W., & Noordegraaf-Eelens, L. (Eds.). (2011). In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk’s spherological poetics of being. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Varnelis, K., & Friedberg, A. (2008). Place: The Networking of Public Space. In K. Varnelis (Ed.), Networked Publics. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. pp. 15–42.

Wark, M. (2013). A Ludic Century? publiseminar.org. Retrieved February 14, 2014, from http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/11/a-ludic-century.

Wolfram, M. (2012). Deconstructing Smart Cities: An Intertextual Reading of Concepts and Practices for Integrated Urban and and ICT Development. In M. Schrenk, V. V. Popovich, P. Zeile, & P. Elisei (Eds.), Re-Mixing the City: Towards sustainability and resilience? REAL CORP. pp. 171–181.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Alison Powell has raised a much needed discussion about what we mean when we talk about a smart citizenry:

Urban geography gives us lots of situations in which we can identify possible conflicts between ‘citizens’ and the city: for example the relationships between people without documentation and the cities in which they live. The people living in illegal dwellings, favelas or new developments just outside of city limits. The people contesting a council tax bill. The guy with the broken door on the Brandon Estate in Southwark who has been unable to get anyone to fix his door in the past three months.

People in cities aren’t automatically citizens, and they are not automatically inclined to enact their relationship to that place in a particular or acceptable way. The power relationships between them and the city could be quite contested. Even if you have the right to withdraw your data from collection by the local authority, are you likely to use that…

Questions of data are increasingly questions of citizenship and voice. As such they need to consider not just the financial value of data to a city or a ‘citizen’ but the relationships of power and influence that characterize our lives. ‘Big data’ are not oil – they are pieces of information about people, and our politics and policy about smart cities should consider this from the start.

In his response to Dan Hill's original manifesto for smart citizens, Bruce Sterling problematised the notion of citizenry:

After reading this I feel that I understand myself better: I like other people’s cities. I like cities where I’m not an eager, engaged, canny urban participant, where I’m not “smart” and certainly not a “citizen,” and where the infrastructures and the policies are mysterious to me. Preferably, even the explanations should be in a language I can’t read.

So I’m maximizing my “inefficiency.” I do it because it’s so enlivening and stimulating, and I can’t be the only one with that approach to urbanism. Presumably there’s some kind of class of us: flaneuring, deriving, situationist smart-city dropouts. A really “smart city” would probably build zones of some kind for us: the maximum-inefficiency anti-smart bohemias.

I think it is worth at this point getting our heads around what a citizen actually is. Media and communications scholar Maria Bakardjieva draws attention to three types of citizen in her 2009 article Subactivism: Lifeworld and Politics in the Age of the Internet.

the liberal citizen in which individual citizens are free to pursue private interests but are ostensibly clients of a state, its services and its protections

the communitarian citizen in which community takes precedence over the individual citizen in the formation of a common good

the republican citizen which is founded on the agentive participation of the individual citizen in the creation of the whole

By not engaging in larger political discourses of citizenship, the smart citizen shift in the smart city movement leaves untouched a lot of complicated issues regarding what we mean when we talk about citizenship. This is what Alison Powell and Bruce Sterling are getting at in their own ways.

[digitalmundane-blog]

What is smart about smart cities? A response from the global south

Ayona Datta raises some great points on the global politics of the smart city in this article (from June 2013):

Who will enjoy these smart cities in India and elsewhere? Who will comprise these smart communities that are intended to be enjoying its privileges? What kinds of social, environmental and spatial justice will smart cities reflect if they will be built on the ruins of rural and indigenous livelihoods? Will they ultimately become yet another category of urban utopia for our future generations to catalog?

So before we all get excited about smart cities as the answer to current global challenges of climate change and resource depletion, let us ask the critical question – will smart cities improve the lives of those on the social, political, environmental and legal margins of the city? Or does its success as a concept and practice rely precisely on the elimination of those on the margins?

When we talk about the smart city, there are really two things that we are talking about.

On the one hand, the smart city as a siginifier. In this instance, discourses are general and are typically driven by those interested in replicable technocratic solutions. This is a very difficult discussion to move and affect.

On the other hand, the smart city as the signified, that is the material and already-existing intersection of the city and ICT. This smart city is embedded in localisms and particularities. Every city is different, every government adopts a different strategy in seeking to implement ICT.

When technologists talk about the smart city as a normative concept, as a signifier, they internalise and normalise a lot of assumptions found in their personal experiences of the urban. This has the obvious danger of perpetuating spatial and social inequalities when such speculation is then actuated.

As critical researchers it is beholden on us to bring the margins into the centre – to question normative assumptions and situate the smart city in the local.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Public Event – Rethinking the Smart City: A Primer

Reblogged from The Programmable City:

The Programmable City project is excited to be supporting an upcoming public discussion with Adam Greenfield around the concept of the smart city.

When: March 24th 7pm – 9pm Where: Dunlop Oriel House, Corner of Fenian Street 7 Westland Row, Dublin 2 Map: http://bit.ly/1i7YapE Speakers: Adam Greenfield, with an introduction by Rob Kitchin Respondents: Aphra Kerr (NUIM), Jim Merricks White (NUIM) Rachel O’Dwyer (TCD)

The event is organised by Provisional University & Dublin Art & Technology Association.

Admission is free but places are limited. To book go to http://bit.ly/O7zu6h.

It’s generally understood that a smart city refers to integrated information and communication technologies, embedded sensor networks and smart girds rapidly becoming part of the infrastructural fabric of our cities, and contributing to its overall function and management. But the smart city is not just an informational overlay. It extends to a broader rationality for resource management (water, energy, transport, air), for governance and agency administration, and for economic stimulation.

While this is significant, various factors seem to have prevented extended public discussion about smart cities. This might be because planning for the smart city is still limited to academic research institutions and government initiatives. It might also be the case that the disciplinary approach to the smart city means it doesn’t always join up with other relevant discussions about urban planning and policy, resource management and the right to the city currently taking place, even though we share and articulate many of the same concerns. We therefore see this event as a primer for more ongoing discussion on the smart city, as it relates to these broader issues and particularly as it relates to Dublin City.

What are we talking about when we talk about the smart city? What limitations are there to the way that the smart city is currently articulated? What alternatives might exist?

Biographies:

Adam Greenfield is a writer, urbanist and founding director of New York City-based design practice Urban scale. His work focuses on the intersection of design, technology and culture, with a strong interest in urban form and metropolitan experience. Greenfield is the author of Everyware: the Dawning age of Ubiquitous Computing (New Riders, 2006) and Against the Smart City (The city is here for you to use) alongside Nuri Kim (Do Projects, 2013).

Rob Kitchin is a professor and ERC Advanced Investigator in the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He has published widely across the social sciences, including 21 books and over 130 articles and book chapters. He is editor of the international journals, Progress in Human Geography and Dialogues in Human Geography, and for eleven years was the editor of Social and Cultural Geography. His book ‘Code/Space’ (with Martin Dodge) won the Association of American Geographers ‘Meridian Book Award’ for the outstanding book in the discipline in 2011. He is currently a PI on the Programmable City project, the Digital Repository of Ireland, and the All-Island Research Observatory.

Update: Unfortunately this event is all booked out now. If you are interested in hearing Adam Greenfield's talk, he is presenting again the following day at The Programmable City launch event. More details are available on The Programmable City event page.

[digitalmundane-blog]

An interesting-looking article by Jennifer Gabrys has been put up in Environment and Planning D advance issue. I will have a read today and get back to you on it.

A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensorbased ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material–political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban ‘citizenship’ to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? In this paper I discuss the ways in which smart-city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. I do this by working through an early and formative smart-city design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative between 2007 and 2008. Revisiting and reworking Foucault’s notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial– material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a ‘citizen’ and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

[algopop]

De-computation - Information Experience Design, RCA

De-computation is an algorithmic study method being taught to students on the IED course at the Royal College of Art. Students are asked to observe and deconstruct systems at museums, shopping centres, language and music, breaking it down into a set of instructions - an algorithm. The approach is inspired by computational thinking, but applied to the everyday design of systems. The course introduction is on vimeo.

Decomputation is a methodology we have developed to structure and inform the process of art and design which draws from the emerging field of data science, specifically computational thinking. The latter typically consists of breaking down a complex problem or dataset into parts; looking for patterns arising from the data; abstracting these patterns, usually in mathematical form; and then designing an algorithm or, in our case, a physical manifestation of the data. We apply this process to areas outside computer science, such as language, music, social systems and finance. 

Taking a museum collection, a subset or a single gallery as a dataset, we devise sets of instructions (algorithms) for exploring the data and identifying individual objects. A sequence of objects is then drawn. Depending on the instructions, personal interpretations of objects can give rise to micro-narratives, or deep investigations of topology can be linked to an object’s history or context as visual research or thinking-through-drawing.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Economist Debates: Smart cities

Featured guest Joe Dignan:

The question "Are smart cities empty hype?" is intentionally provocative and was no doubt designed to appeal to the well-known prejudices in the arena, but it presupposes that there is a common definition of smart cities and that there is one market. Equally, the debate appears to polarise it between a "resistance" movement of citizen activists, academia and small and medium-sized enterprises against the hegemonic ambitions of a few global IT companies. It would be wonderful if it were that simple. I would argue that "smart cities" is not hype but useful shorthand for the natural process of applying maturing technology and thinking to current societal challenges. The vibrancy of cities is important…

Once we decouple the "smart" in smart cities from the IT industry, we enter a world of "intelligent cities", "digital cities", "connected cities" and more. Those grappling with smart-city solutions include the telecoms, financial services, utilities, construction, health-care, education, government, public safety and national security, and environment sectors…

While I think Dignan is essentially correct in calling for a move away from explicitly smart cities, I say why not be rid of the adjective altogether. Describing technology as intelligent, sentient or cognisant doesn't really work for me. This is a pathetic fallacy which renders invisible the man or woman in the machine, denuding it of politics.

Come to think of it, the city isn't very helpful either. What we need is a focus on districts, suburbs, neighbourhoods, streets, estates and homes. Our computation needs to be situated in the places which it affect and which are in turn affected by it.

[digitalmundane-blog]

There are currently two equally powerful, but ideologically opposed, visions of what a smart city is and what it should be. In the blue corner is the paternalistic approach, in which a network of sensors, transport arteries, motion-sensitive street lighting and smart grids feed into a central operating centre. There, a team of civil servants and a mayoral Wizard of Oz respond to these electronic indicators and usher citizens accordingly.

In the red corner, is the city networked from the bottom up. Here, the smart technology is not billion-dollar investments made by city authorities, but the smartphones we carry and our internet-connected homes. The rise of apps and social networks allows us to navigate, edit and influence the cities we live in, telling authorities rather than waiting to be told.

These two positions are not irredeemably opposed. I will give two examples of where this is explored.

In FutureEverything's Bespoke Smart City Debate Anthony Townsend described a smart city in which ICT companies would implement solutions both general and specific to some extent. The debate, he suggests, is over what percentage the smart city can and should be generalised. This is not a smart city from the bottom-up, but rather a top-down smart city with localised stakeholder consultation.

In his deconstruction of the smart city [pdf], Marc Wolfram describes the term as a floating signifier but not an empty one. By this he means that while the word can be employed to whatever end so desired, it is not without a centralised meaning. As such interventions against the top-down smart city are folded back into its broad definition. This has the effect of normalising a specific managerial mode of urban governance and occluding more critical debate on the role of computation in the city.

I don't know whether it is possible to resist this term outright. I think it has a certain momentum to it now that will be very hard to slow. Regardless, there are broader traditions of embedded, situated, ubiquitous and pervasive computing which offer technologists ways to engage with this shift outside its dominant rhetoric.

[digitalmundane-blog]

Google Trends: ubiquitous computing, digital cities, everyware, intelligent cities, smart cities.