Neo-Geography, Datascapes and 'The Public Sphere'

"How can we understand the city in times of globalisation and explosion of scale? Do we lose control in these quantities or can we file its components and manipulate them? Let us imagine a city that is only based upon data. A city, that wants to be described only by information. A city, that doesn't know any topography, no context, purely huge, only data..."

'Metacity/Datatown', MVRDV, 1999 (film).

The Personal - 'Mapping the Credit Crunch' - BBC Radio 4. Maptube Engine.

The Absurd - 'Global McDonalds Big Mac Prices, 2007' - Maptube Engine.

"Geography is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance and one that is becoming known as 'Neogeography'...a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in a manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of Neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and/or/ artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of 'real' geographic techniques."

Hudson.Smith et.al (2008). The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life. Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), London.

In the discussion of a public sphere, Alan Mckee (2006) debunks the Modernist notion of the term 'public sphere' as a singular, progressive, and consolidated representation of a common culture/interest among all people. Commonality, according to the modernist doctrine, is the glue holding the elements of the public sphere together. 

In reality, the fragmentation that have always existed in the public sphere are becoming more visible to each other; - beginning from the extension of voting rights to the rise of broadcast culture. What is once the homogeneous 'official public sphere' is now challenged by distinct interpretation of places based on personal and affiliated memory. If we discuss the issue of heritage in this light, we may ask what is important to people;- is it an iconic monumental building of 'cultural' significance, scribed by years of official documents and media as an object of historic relevance? Or is it a visually indistinct, un-noticeable, perhaps run-down building that is associated with an aggregate of intimate memories and experiences concerning the neighborhood in question?

Left: Place (official, iconic, civic, progressive) - Customs House Library, Circular Quay. 

Right: Place (fragmented, memonic, negotiated) - Former Community Language School, Auburn.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of information we now consume digitally is user created, and the distinction between the professional and the amateur in broadcast culture is increasingly blurred thanks to the availability of content making and airing tools/techniques at little or no cost. Broadcasting has been transformed from a read-only to a read-write culture. What kind of representation of geography can we draw in light of this, keeping in mind on one hand the rise of user generated information and on the other the imperative to account for an indeterminate, fragmented, and negotiated nature of a 'public sphere.'

How can collective information contribute to a "bottom-up" approach in identifying a site/brief?

Preamble:

Formerly, an approach to the design process involved having both the program and site as predetermined criteria. We are given a site to work on and the function that it is to be, and if we weren't given those we tell ourselves firstly that we want to build an X on a place Y. We then examine everything that place Y has on offer for a building X, or anything surprising that building X can offer to Y. Either case, we have made the prejudgment that building X is the best thing that could go on place Y or vice versa. We practice as a god-mode architect who says that "i want to build this building that would fit onto this site, believe me it would." 

What if we leave either the site or the program as indeterminate factors? What if we know what we want to build, but lets leave the site out to the jury, especially if we are looking at a large scale building X that would have a significant impact to site Y. Rather than holding copious amounts of "community interaction sessions" with a few places the designers have in mind, what if we can tap into the vast and varying quantities of related information on the internet and translate those into a brief or identify a site?

Introduction:

“Web environments can be pictured as data bases that can be provided as a central service or can be built from the bottom up in decentralised fashion. To an extent this reflects our division between designers and users with central systems having designers in distinctly different roles from users.”

“The extent to which users and/or designers can create derivative products from the data no matter how it is created is part of the functionality of the system. This can range from entirely preconceived ways of manipulating the data in the search for patterns or networks to loose sets of rules that users and designers can invoke in creating searches for new kinds of patterns that are not predetermined.”

Hudson-Smith Et.al. Mapping for the Masses: Accessing Web2.0 through Crowdsourcing. UCL Working Paper Series 143 (8). London: CASA

This experiment follows on from the initial project proposal of an live/work/play office precinct situated at Civic Place, Parramatta. The experiment would test the proposal of Parramatta as the best suited place for commerce oriented redevelopment by combining current market data related to "commerce oriented development." Three sets of information, (the employment market conditions, the commercial real estate market conditions, and the housing real estate conditions) have been scrutinized in order to arrive at a place for commercial oriented development at the LGA scale. In preference to real-time and flexible information, the experiment shyed away from "official data" arrived by sources such as census data or RPData as they tended to be skewed, outdated, or generalised.

  

Assumptions/Challenges:

High expectations of the data turning in favor of Parramatta LGA was anticipated as it is heavily backed by current metropolitan strategies as a key performance area for commercial redevelopment. It was also expected that market data would be easily obtainable in legible forms, that is, the data would immediately present us with a title, a figure of density and a time factor. These data were assumed to be obtainable in RSS format.

The outcome was that a significant portion of these data were skewed to highlight some areas, for example, premium listings where sellers paid extra to duplicate their advertisement were evident in expensive areas such as Sydney and North Sydney. To maintain the information asymmetry between buyers and real estate agents, many of the data were not available on RSS feeds, and the methodology was amended in order to strip out website data and reconvert them into useful RSS feeds.

Methodology:

Website information from various employment and real estate agencies were fed into Yahoo Pipes. A technique known as "mashup" was used to unpack and recombine the data into relevant formats, namely the location the intensity and a brief textual or pictorial description. These were then converted into RSS feeds which were able to be cut and organised into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was then translated into ArcGIS for analysis. 

An examination into the general descriptive content of each LGA area when converted into RSS was done to determine the specific market climate for each area. For example, whether the area was compact and centralising where the advertisements showed an abundance of new, compact properties or whether the area was dispersed, decentralised where the advertisement showed an abundance of detached homes, old warehouses, etc.

Results:

The data was recombined and evaluated. Parramatta LGA was third as the most suited place to build an office complex. After Sydney City, the experiment identified Blacktown as a more suitable candidate for an office complex based on economic criteria. The experiment was affected by the quality of the data by the way that the broadcasters tended to hide information on pricing and size (residential), and also by the way that the data is deliberately skewed to make certain items more prominent than others.   

    

Experiment 1.1 - 1.3 - Still representation of dynamic information

Experiment 1.1 - Animating

Experiment 1.2 - Remove/Bend

Experiment 1.2 - Extrude/Pipe

Research Matrix Released

Click on the image below to be redirected to the research matrix titled 'The In-visible Envelope' hosted on an deviantart account. Meanwhile i will need to scout for some internet space this is getting too unorganised.

Urban Tapestries. Social Tapestries: Public Authoring in the Wireless City

Found a social media, geo-tagging experiment that has been done in the past involving mobile technology. Unfortunately, the project is beyond its active stage, all program source codes, live-feeds etc, are all gone.

"Urban Tapestries is an interactive, location-based wireless application allowing users to access and author location-specific multimedia content. It is a forum for sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving ephemeral races of peoples' presence in the geography of the city...Users will be able to add new locations, location content and the 'threads' which link individual locations to local contexts. Urban Tapestries privileges the experience of the user over typical 'publishing' systems which control and author the user experience." From the Urban Tapestries Website



Uses of Urban Tapestries will be able to select threads to follow or drift across all threads. Users are able to add locations be tagging the GPS co-ordinates and uploading it to a central server, along with related content such as text, sounds, movies and images. For more immediate social interactions, a time-limited street graffiti system will enable users to leave messages tagged to locations (a local event announcement, an observation). Users can create their own threads through an area (favorite places, significant places) and upload them for others to access.





"Urban Tapestries also aims to be a platform for anonymous people-to-people communication...An integral part of the system will be a time-limited 'street graffiti' system to enable people to leave messages for others that will fade with time." From: Giles Lane. Urban Tapestries: Wireless networking, public authoring and social knowledge.

All visual content here is the property of Proboscis.

What is a Mental Map?

In the Lynch-ian tradition we have formerly ascribed mental maps of our city as an abstract reduction of its physical and visual properties. That the city can be read as an abstraction and re-organisation of its physical composition into five key elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks) remains the primary design research methodology of your typical site work. The problem is, whilst it is noted that these mental images are subject based and doesn’t sustain a overall reading of an urban context, we are still stuck in a Gehl-like tradition of putting a star on a landmark, coloring in an open space, draw lots of dots along a street edge, and finding the next darkest (but not too dark) marker to mark out a border around a collection of streets and lots. And if you want to claim that something different is experienced within that border you have just drawn, then you would hatch it in one of the brightest hatch-work available. We then make a bold claim that this representation - this abstraction - truly reflects what the whole population regards of the site. This, you say, is experienced by everybody, everyday, and in all situations.

Five elements: Paths, Edge, District, Node, Landmark. From: Kevin Lynch. Image of the City

In the mobile city, can we still represent mental maps on the premise of Physical Separation, Bounded-ness, Hierarchy, Presence, and Linkages that we scribe out on a scaled map background taken from Google Earth? Thanks to mobile communications technology, these have ceded in favor of subject based hyper-coordination and micro-coordination, which in turn makes all the concerns mentioned above more pressing. Nowadays, way-finding and sequencing are now replaced by temporal spatial orderings that is accomplished between users, the "where are you?" and "what are you doing now?" of wireless communications. Do things have to appear as what they are?

Above: Temporal distortion of Parramatta "The mobile phone enables their users to call and be called instantly and directly, making a 'real-time lifestyle' or 'just-in-time' lifestyle where the old schedule of minutes, hours, days and weeks becomes shattered into a constant stream of negotiations, reconfiguration, and rescheduling...By virtue of the cellular phone, meeting places have become indeterminate, fluid territories, rather than precise spots. As such, time space co-ordinates according to which mobile users move, meet each other and get together in urban space always remain uncertain, changeable, fluid and floating." From Alessandro Aurigi and Fiorella De Cindio. Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City.

What does it mean for boundary, distance and displacement when you can do things remotely, accessing multiple locations by one activity or by doing several functions on the same location. A recent experiment into peoples usage patterns on public Wi-Fi reveals that users do not perceive the technology in terms of its reach in space but as having presence only when they could access it. It is not visualized in a visuo-spatial image but more similar to notions of social network with strong and weak ties. The perception of the Wi-Fi bounded zone is not one of graduated change but more like the flicking of a switch, when the connection is lost.

Above: Geographic representation of location of Public WiFi zones in Parramatta and perceived reach (left) and reduction of these to 0 distance (right) "A person is thus perceived as being separated from another only by a switch to a network connection, not a physical distance in space." Katharine S. Willis. Places, Situations, and Connections.

Up Next, Precedents!

@Rosamond - SkinForm Project

Was just mining for some more info and came across this technology done by our archrivals at UTS two years ago! Check out the skinform project. This really reminds me of Rosamond's motor and ballon experiment last week.

"We are developing an interactive pneumatic architecture that transforms dynamically in response to context. Its air-filled cells comprise a multilayered skin that allows for digitally controlled airflow to transform the shape in realtime. Collaborators are Master of Architecture candidates working in the Computational Environments Studio run by Joanne Jakovich, Bert Bongers and Jason McDermott at the University of Technology, Sydney [UTS]."

http://skinform.blogspot.com/
http://jakovich.net.au/skinform/skinform.php

Smartphones - Converging Real-time Media and Augmented Space

First test on Live Feeds overlaid on Augmented Reality Applications (Acrossair) on an iPhone 3GS (not mine). Excuse the amateur quality and background noise. Do not make the same mistake of rushing and signing up for an iPhone 3G they can only display on a flat map layout.

Live feed information from both private and social media are uploaded and continually updated with geographic co-ordinates. The video shows instant information on live shows occurring today and also a collection of Panoramio photos that detemines the most popular locations for photo shoots (imagine yourself as a tourist attempting to instantly locate the most scenic location for a memorable photo opportunity).

The program has limited capabilities of displaying live twitter feeds, not to mention the lack of twitter users in Sydney. If we could imagine for a second that twitter feeds can be labelled and filtered according to keywords (location, activity, feelings, hours old the tweet) and updated on Augmented Geo-locations, could they reveal hidden, momentary, spots of activities which we may not have considered before?

Looks like TwittARound and flutter are likely contenders for these kind of possibilities..

Above: TwittARound augmented reality social networking browser.

Above: flutter - social media mapper

Augmented (hyper)Reality - Keichii Matsuda

"The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it. " Sypnosis of the Author, Keichii Matsuda.

Augmented Reality systems shows the beginnings of a new relationship between information and inhabited space. Geographic Information Systems can not only mark the paths to an intended task, but also triggers the executions of instructions.

What if users of the city becomes closely registered to their portable devices and smartphones? What if your every task done is assisted by a continuous set of instructions? What if at any moment you can determine the current hotspots and activities occurring in a city, and have your digital counterparts precisely calculate, re-calibrate, and correct the steps you have to take in order to get you to your destination?

What if social principles of inhabiting city form is filtered out and discarded in favor of electronic tracking and information overlay? Would Gehl's principles of the optional and social activities be made redundant as we are more able to locate our friends and acquaintances on live feeds and at lesser public domains? Would the element of surprise and delight slowly fade out as we rely more on precise locations and instructions, and as we are continually updated on things occurring around us live?

Feel free to give comments. Will begin to explore visualisation and social media on digital devices in the next post.

Social Media and Urban Representation

How can we visualize the spontaneous and the instantaneous in contemporary urban experience? What can we disseminate from the effects of wireless technologies and personal networks in urban cognition? How can we understand urban places that is shifted from geometric industrial models to personal social modes of values?

The ability to broadcast to a global audience is now available to private individuals at minimal costs. New forms of Social Media (Web 2.0) opens up new avenues for the metamorphic representation of city places. User broadcast information exists in a live form, and can be capable of instantaneous responses and spontaneous updates.

A simple web crawling exercise through these media will reveal hidden niches in an urban context. Doing a twitter search on your destination will reveal more lively activities occurring within the hour in the more unrecognizable places in the city. Instead of relying on fixed features in the city, portable devices can transmit and project destinations directly and calculate your travel. These time-based, feature maps could turn out to present a more accurate and continually updated representation of place in the city, compared to the generalised color blots on a brochure map or a council plan.

See below interactive flash clip for a brief summary. More on the topic of Augmented Space next.

Visit http://fav.me/d2mvva1 if the video doesnt load