Remediating Cities: The Changing City and Public Digital Domain

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Remediating Cities The Changing City and Public
Digital Domain

• Prof. Stephen Graham
• Department of Geography
• University of Durham, U.K.
• s.d.n.graham_at_dur.ac.uk

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From Dreams of Transcendence to the
Remediation of Urban Life

• 1960s-1990s Pervasive, antiurban obsession with
  substitution/ dematerialisation/ death of
  distance
• Absolute binaries city/cyberspace,
  online/offline, virtual/material,
  cyberspace/meatspace etc.
• Widespread assumption that ICTs would inevitably
  eviscerate and simply replace cities/
  corporeality/ materiality/ physical flow
• Cities (concentrations of space to overcome
  time), body and transport abandoned because of
  real-time interactions to overcome space
• Cast away Ballast of materiality (Benedikt)
• Fantasies of complete transcendence
  utopian/dystopian/neoliberal/cyberlibertarian

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Cyberspace as Separate Domain Out There
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A Manifest Destiny or Anything-Anytime
Anywhere Dream Examples

• The city as a form of major dimensions must
  inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a
  movie" McLuhan 1964
• If cities did not exist, it now would not be
  necessary to invent them" Naisbitt and Aburdene
  1991
• The city of the past slowly becomes a
  paradoxical agglomeration in which relations of
  immediate proximity give way to
  interrelationships over distance Virilio 1993
• In urban terms, once time has become
  instantaneous, space becomes unnecessary Pawley
  1997
• When work is a few keystrokes away from the
  comfort
• of your home-office, why even build in
  reality? Kaba 1996

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Co-Evolution and Impasse

• More sophisticated perspectives on co-evolution
  of cities and ICTs emerged
• Space of flows/space of places
• Realisation that metropolitan cores actually
  powerhouses of digital innovation and clustering
• Widespread policy innovations attempting to forge
  creative cities, digital cities, e-governance
  etc. through both urban and ICT urban initiatives
• But conceptual and policy IMPASSE! Limits
  reached?
• Need new conceptual and policy paradigms

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Starting Points

• Massive parallel growth in ICT use, urbanisation
  and physical transport flows and mobilities
• Crucial material geographies of ICTs
• New media applications increasingly articulate
  closely with, and animate, fine grain of urban
  places and everyday life and mobility
• Complex spatial divisions of labour Archipeligo
  economy. Risks of splintering urbanism
• Complex combinations of face-to-face and
  electronic interactions within and between cities
  
• Compulsion of proximity for burgeoning
  creative industries and people, as well as
  massive ICT flows
• ICTs have quickly become normal, taken for
  granted and banal. Now the ordinary urban
  landscape
• A technology is most important when it becomes so
  ubiquitous that it becomes culturally invisible

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Possible New Paradigm? Remediating Cities

• Bolter and Grusin
• Cyberspace is very much a part of our
  contemporary world. It is constituted through a
  series of remediations. As a digital network,
  cyberspace remediates the electric communications
  networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and
  the telephone as virtual reality, it remediates
  the visual space of painting, film, and
  television and as social space, it remediates
  such historical places as cities and parks and
  such 'nonplaces' as theme parks and shopping
  malls. Like other contemporary telemediated
  spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier
  media, which are themselves embedded in material
  and social environments".

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6 Examples 1. Remediating Mobilities
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RecommodificationPremium E-Tolled Spaces and
Mobilities
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Remediating BordersFace as a Bar Code
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RFIDs The Triumph of Logistics and Ubiquitous
Electronic Tracking
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Ubiquitous Computing and Sentient Urban
Landscapes
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2. Remediating Consumption Rifkins Age of
Access
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Consumption and Experience of Neighbourhoods
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New Urban Social Movements Exposing the Politics
of Digital Information in Neoliberal Cities
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The Telepresent Landscape Remote
Consumption of Place
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3. Remediating Social Exclusion Software-Sorted
Societies
The modern city exists in a haze of software
instructions Amin and Thrift
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4. Remediating Landscape (Jane McGonigal)
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5. Remediating Bodies
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Remediating Urban Public Realms A New Biology
of Culpability Shift to algorithmic and
biometric surveillance systems
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Post 9-11 Surveillance Surge
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Remediating Streets
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Deep Place Parallel Challenges to Reassert Urban
Public Realms Through Remediation

• Exploit
• Geospatial
• Software
• Wireless
• GPS Location Services

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Social Networks and Social Software
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Brings a New Politics of (In)visibility
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Cities as Digital Playgrounds
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Animating the Past Digital Collective Memory
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Remediating Urban and Public Art
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Conclusions Urban Remediation for Creative
Cities?

• Powerful, dynamic perspective handles multiple
  scales from body to globe and moves beyond
  conceptual and policy impasse caused by unhelpful
  binaries
• Above all, place still critical, probably
  increasingly so!
• Urban remediations rely on subtle, complex and
  continuous combinations of virtual and
  urban/corporeal/physical/place-based
• Underline how ICTs have very quickly become
  ordinary - The most basic and prosaic background
  to contemporary urban life
• The urban is ICTs ICTs are the urban. Not
  separate realms
• Urban life continuously brought into being by
  massive, globally-stretched complexes of
  increasingly automated logistics, consumption,
  surveillance and social systems
• But, with a few exceptions, research and policy
  paradigms lagging far behind. Often trapped in
  anachronistic paradigms.

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Main Policy Challenges

• View remediating cities as multiscale
  sociotechnical process
• Beyond physicalist, boosterist, gentrifying
  paradigms
• Develop relational' conceptions of cities
  space, place and time continually brought into
  being and animated through remediation,
  operating at scales from body to globe
• Creatively shape ICTs and urban spaces in
  parallel as joined and inseparable hybrids but
  without fetishising technology
• Bold and flexible experiments in urban
  remediation needed as basis for creative,
  sustainable and just future cities
• Must strive to revitalise urban public realms
  through remediation, addressing dangers of
  electronic/physical capsularisation and sprawl,
  and post 9-11 surveillance surge
• Also address growing invisibility of social and
  technical power the growth of software-sorted
  digital divides

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Polarising Effects of High-tech Megaprojects