The Appropriation of a Digitally-Augmented Agora: Field Study of the Structuration and Spatialization of an Issue Public in Urban Space (original) (raw)

Civic Media Platforms and Participatory Urbanism: A Critical Reflection

International Journal of Architectural Computing, 2012

In this paper, we explicate our research on technology-mediated urban experience specific to two hyper-local tests in which the space of the ‘public’ is transformed into a virtual network by connective broadcasting. The first case study presents collective mapping in Rio de Janeiro toward increased civic engagement and sustainability, the second tests documentation of political demonstrations for strategic and archival purposes for Occupy Boston. Grouped under the term “participatory urbanism,” the projects intend to explore how an individual activates interstitial space (between the physical city and hovering networks, between public and private) by engaging technology and civic media to affect change in the built environment. The physical and virtual environments serve as reciprocal sources of information, engendering a collective practice of shared encounters. We investigate how such encounters of user-centered activity through mobile and web-based media support or implicate the ...

Another Brick in the Wall: Public Space, Visual Hegemonic Resistance, and the Physical/Digital Continuum

In this thesis I will demonstrate that there is a similarity between the use of physical walls and digital walls as means of ideological dissemination by power structures as well as socio-political protesters. Also, I will show that their use in this manner not only changes the way that both function ideologically, but also changes the environment that these walls are created/exist in as well. The first case study will analyze Banksy’s employment of carnivalesque graffiti as a means of protest. The second case study will analyze the use of digital public space and “walls” created within social media as tools of protest, paralleling the earlier examples pertaining to the physical walls of public space. The third case study will look at the employment of the digital “walls” of Facebook and Twitter in conjunction with the use of public space in Cairo and its role in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

Public space and public rituals: Engagement and protest in the digital age

Urban Studies, 2022

In our technology-based society, individuals have more tools that they can use to manage and 'show' themselves in public space. In public space, they are monitored by agencies using surveillance practices but they also share information through location-aware technologies. This profound condition alters social norms and, with that, not only change self-rituals practiced in public but also group gatherings in public spaces. With an emphasis on political protests, this commentary focuses on a set of related questions: what characterises contemporary self-rituals in public space? How are these rituals being altered by digitisation processes? How are these changes manifested in the performance of the self during protests? This commentary suggests that public protests in the digital age are 'moments of togetherness', accelerated by social media, which dramatically enhance personalisation processes in collective actions. Reflecting on the contemporary alteration of group rituals and protests as extensions of the self, the commentary ends with a discussion about the opportunities and challenges this might bring for future collective actions.

Performing the City: Exploring the Bandwidth of Urban Place-Making through New-Media Tactics

Making Futures, 2014

Discourses on political participation, urban studies, innovation, and ICT development are becoming more and more entangled. Although social and cultural studies have recognized the importance of material entities in organizing and performing civic engagement for quite some time (see, for example, Marres 2011), we can also observe how the notion of publics is gaining more and more influence in the fields of design and technological development (see, for example, Le Dantec 2012). Within the context of urbanity, much falls into the realm of "smart cities," but the notion of "smart" is contested. We have heard about the number of people with Internet access, the number of devices talking to each other, and the potential revenue achievable for future service providers over and over again. It is not surprising that a transaction-based business rhetoric prevails, but we can also observe how the potential of networked communities, online or offline, is becoming an increasingly important factor in debating the concept of "smart cities." Halpern (2005), for example, understands the combination of ICTs and networked communities as a form of social capital, and his take on smartness, which is shared by many others, stresses the potential of local interaction: … ICT networks may have great potential to boost local social capital, provided they are geographically "intelligent," that is, are smart enough to connect you directly to your neighbors; are built around natural communities; and facilitate the collective knowledge. (ibid., 509-510). Performing the City 279 an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax." But those meat axes are no longer the only way to go. Instead, Paulos points to how "today's urban informatics effect change at the other end of the spectrum." "Instead of rewriting space with a few large-scale strokes," he continues, "they allow us to re-engineer an infinite number of small-scale relationships." In this re-engineering of small-scale relationships, new publics will arise, and they will overlap with processes and "things" of design. The use of quotation marks around "things" is deliberate. The etymology of the word, originating from the Nordic pre-Christian culture, can be traced back to the meaning of an assembly, which was decided on beforehand to take place at a certain time and at a certain place to deal with certain "matters of concern" to a specific community. In the book Design Things, we suggest that we revisit and partly revert to the etymological history of things (A. Telier 2011). A major challenge for design today has to do with what is being designed: it is not just an object or a product, but also a thing-that is, a socio-material assembly that deals with matters of concern-in the original meaning of the word. Things are, thus, not only the results of understanding human relations and then developing a product addressing the relations such as in user-centered design. Rather, they are performed by sociomaterial "collectives of humans and non-humans," including both designed artifacts and the places where they are used. At the same time, a designed artifact is potentially a thing made public, since once it is delivered to its users it becomes a matter of concern to them with its new possibilities of interaction. Consequently, in emerging publics, there is a complex entanglement taking place between citizens, public spaces, and things. Furthermore, if objects are seen as an effect of an array of relations, it follows that they do not exist in themselves; they are, rather, performed and emerging. They are also spatial, in that they establish the necessary conditions for creating and transforming space, which is also not given or fixed but, rather, performed. According to Bruno Latour (2004), we are accustomed to smooth and risk-free objects that are characterized by having clear boundaries with a welldefined essence, in which the producer becomes invisible when, for example, a product is released. In contrast, Latour puts forth the concept of tangled objects, or risky attachments, with no clear boundaries to the environment and where the producers are part of the definition. "Mad cow disease" and contaminated blood may be two examples of such tangled, complex, hard to manage objects. They are subject to constant translation and re-definition and are not detached from the consequences they trigger. In many cases, the triggered consequences take the form of revealed issues and controversies in relation to how public spaces are planned and used. Carl DiSalvo elaborates another reference to Latour, developed in cooperation with Weibel, while considering their question "How things are made public?"-a question that addresses how complex situations of present-day society are made visible in a way that permits people to take actions on the situations at hand. DiSalvo (2009)

The politics of public space in the media city

First Monday, 2006

What happens when the TV screen leaves home and moves back into the city? The public domain of the 21st century is no longer defined simply by material structures such as streets and plazas. But nor is it defined solely by the virtual space of electronic media. Rather the public domain now emerges in the complex interaction of material and immaterial spaces. These hybrid spaces may be called ‘media cities’. In this essay, I argue that different instances of the public space in modernity have emerged in the shifting nexus between urban structures and specific media forms. Drawing on the pioneering work of sociologist Richard Sennnett, I offer a critical analysis of the forms of access and modes of interaction, which might support a democratic public culture in cities connected by digital networks and illuminated by large urban screens.

The Spatiality of Control: ICT and Physical Space in Social Protest

Recent years have witnessed an increasing internationalization of claims as well as claimants with respect to social protest as a result of various notions of globalization and the spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) (Tilly and Wood, 2009). In this contribution, we will show how the rise of ICT goes along with a shift from a society of discipline to a society of control (Deleuze, 1992), or, more precisely, a superimposition of these two modes of power (cf. Savat, 2009b) and how this calls for a re-conception of space as an apparatus of control (cf. Agamben, 2001). We take a theoretically novel and critical stand by conceptually elaborating Tilly’s work on social movements (Tilly, 1999; 2003; Tilly and Wood, 2009) with DeLanda’s assemblage theory (2006) as well as taking the spatiality and technicity of social movements into consideration. We have chosen the transversality of protest assemblages as our entry point and discuss their shifting performances both with regard to their effectiveness to organize across space-time and their uses and production, of urban space. We illustrate our arguments with recent social protest events.

Urban Connective Action: The Case of Events Hosted in Public Space

Urban Planning, 2020

In the past decade, significant transformations have influenced the governance of urban public spaces. There has also been a growth in new public spheres associated with digital media networks, informing and influencing the production and regulation of urban space. In this article, we explore the role of digital and social media as a form of connective action supporting public campaigns about the privatisation and erosion of public space in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. We draw on analysis of Twitter data, interviews and observations of offline events to illustrate how a broad coalition of actors utilise online and offline tactics to contest the takeover of public space, confirming that that the virtual and the physical are not parallel realms but continuously intersecting social realities. Finally, we reflect on the extent to which digital media-enabled connective action can influence the orientation of urban controversies debates and lead to material change in the way urban publ...

Constructing Public Space| New “Danger Zone” in Europe: Representations of Place in Social Media–Supported Protests

2016

Social media–supported protests build circuits of collective interaction that grow across physical, material, digital, and virtual spaces. Extending the research on the governance of communicative spaces, we ask whether representations of place define the public space and whether their analysis suffices to grasp the powerful processes embedded within that space. Consequently, we analyze the available representations of place in the Twitter communication about the protests against the Akademikerball, which is a ball organized by the right-wing populist party, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), in Vienna, Austria. The analysis shows multiple forms of representation, but further consideration of its limitations takes into account three other key features of the public space. Together with an examination of representations, the analysis of textures, structures, and connections inform four modes of analysis that ought to be explored simultaneously to comprehensively understand the governa...

Electronic Presence: Encounters as Sites of Emergent Publics in Mediated Cities

Rose, Gillian (ed.), Seeing the City Digitally Processing Urban Space and Time, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 179-205, 2022

Arguing that encounters among strangers are one source of publics in urban spaces, this chapter explores how publics change when encounters involve not merely humans but also what Kevin Robins terms “electronic presence”. The chapter surveys debates about the public sphere in the urban context and more recent posthumanist interventions in understanding public cultures in mediated cities. The chapter discusses three case studies: people’s daily encounters with outdoor advertising, highlighting the continuing relevance of power relations; social media posts about street encounters with xenophobic assaults, reminding us that visualizing can also mean distancing; and urban catastrophe relief campaigns in the absence of physical encounters, demonstrating that data about publics assumes a performative, rather than merely problem-solving role in urban living