Being Human In Digital Cities

Being Human in Digital Cities is the title of Myria Georgiou‘s excellent new book, which is a must-read for anyone interested in digital technologies, cities and humans. Which would be most of us, you’d think, though the book’s starting point is that much academic writing on digital technologies pays too little attention to ‘the human’.

I’ve remarked on this lack of interest in the human in much of the work produced by geographers looking at things urban and digital before, in a paper published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (paywalled, sorry). In a lot of critical academic work, in fact, the tech – code, software, infrastructure – is given powerful causal agency to shape urban life, while the ‘human’ – if it remains at all as an analytical category – is positioned as its excessive and resistant other. Myria’s book is an extended counterpoint to that framing. She argues powerfully that critical scholarship needs to pay careful attention to the ‘human’, partly because it remains a powerful category and experience in and of the world, but also because giving it attention is what Big Tech is itself doing right now. The necessary question then becomes, what kind of human emerge in digitally-mediated cities, and with what effects?

Humans, Myria says, have critical and creative capabilities; the human is also a discursive category. From these two qualities, she proposes a threefold approach to analysing how the human is both conceptualised and acts in digital cities. (She also has lots of important and careful things to say about digital cities.) The first is what she calls popular humanism, which assumes a universal humanity (and is therefore implicitly racialised, classed and often gendered in specific ways); popular humanism is post-neoliberalising, and is mobilised by powerful institutions in the city to normalise the surveillance and management of everyday life with digital technologies by establishing hierarchies between different kinds of humans. The second is demotic humanism, a space of everyday, messy, unpredictable human agency and creativity, in which digital technologies are given affective and experiential meaning and in which popular humanism can be normalised but also reconfigured. And the third is critical humanism, which Myria defines as an analytical and normative framework from which popular humanism can be critiqued. The latter is necessary because the agents of popular humanism aim to establish a “seamless digital order” which “tie the human to deep and lasting transformations of social, economic and cultural life in the city” (page 27).

This is a powerful analytical framework. It avoids meta-theory from the Western canon in favour of extended engagements with critical race and postcolonial thinkers (though Foucault is given a nod, and I kind of felt the lingering presence of Lefebvre too, though maybe that’s just an echo of the power of triadic approaches to urban life). It draws generously on a wide range of scholarship on cities and digital technologies. I liked the focus on ordering as a form of power rather than, say, commodification or surveillance, very much – it feels more capacious and less paranoid than either of the latter. And I particularly liked the emphasis on the human as a discursive category.

The book also addresses directly something that I’ve noticed in my current research on how cities are visualised with and through digital software and screens: just how frequently humans are pictured. As Myria says, “the digital order is also a biopolitical order” (page 35). The popular scepticism about the big digital corporations seems to be resulting in a sustained effort by them to picture happy humans in order to address and appeal to them. It needs overtly to claim that it will deliver a better human future, and therefore also frequently pictures happy people in happy places as part of that claim. So I agree completely with Myria that popular humanism deserves critical attention.

Of course, I have other thoughts too, particularly on how the book’s disciplinary grounding in urban and cultural studies structure its account of power in various ways. Critical versions of those disciplines (like digital geography) are very keen to detect power, and resistance to power, everywhere. One trace of this enthusiasm is the book’s assumption that popular humanism is always bad (because post-neoliberal), and that demotic humanism is the source of some kind of challenge to it. I think there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that both are somewhat more complicated than that. Demotic humanism extends beyond the book’s fascinating and extensive case studies of groups engaging with digital tech for what critical scholars would broadly agree is for ‘good’. In my home city, for example, Facebook and the app NextDoor are used to mobilise a coalition of anti-fifteen minute city, anti-low traffic zones, anti-vaxxer libertarians, quite apart from all the toxic vileness hosted by social media more generally. The demotic is has a much wider range of register than the book acknowledges.

However, the book’s development of critical humanism as a concept works to displace the potential conflation of the critical with the demotic, of the radical with the popular. Critical humanism is “an epistemology for contesting the digital makings of a hierarchical humanity” (page 144). It prioritises care, inclusion and non-hierarchical forms of human identity. A few examples are discussed briefly in the book but Myria then elaborates what she calls nine ‘values’ which define critical humanism, drawing on rich range of critical thinkers. I guess political theorists might want a bit more detail on how to define those things, and indeed who defines them, but the point I take away is that this is a specific form of digitally-mediated humanism, diverse and emergent, and its specificity needs careful attention to distinguish it from demotic messiness. I very much look forward to reading the empirical scholarship which I am sure will be inspired to use these values as a methodological framework.

The second assumption in Myria’s book I’m currently thinking about in my own work is the claim that popular humanism is an effect of institutions, particularly corporations, the state and the media, developed in their headquarters, labs and factories. This is true. However, institutions are staffed by people. (Indeed, a lot of popular humanism relies precisely on creative individuals, designing the visuals and events that sell it). The workplace cultures of tech industries have been given considerable attention by feminist and other critical scholars, who have strongly indicated the alignment of certain forms of white masculinity with the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos of what Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have called ‘the smartness mandate‘. (I’m thinking of the work of Mar Hicks, Judy Wajcman, Charlton McIlwaine and Nathan Ensmenger, among many others.) This suggests that the forms of human at work – literally – in making popular humanism also deserve attention.

My final reflection prompted by Myria’s book is about the forms of power that it focusses on. Addressing power and/as order enacted by institutions and platforms tends to neglect the massively popular digital mediations of urban life in more unruly things like computer games and blockbuster movies and tv shows. These experiences of digitally-mediated cities are hugely popular and widespread. I’m not suggesting that they are necessarily radical in any way, or that they don’t do their own kinds of order-making. But they do offer another register of power – spectacular, seductive, pleasurable, communal, emotional, embodied – that also deserves careful attention for its equally specific constitutions of the human and the urban. I think, anyway.

All this is really only to say, though, that I have a slightly different approach to thinking about the human and the digital in cities than Myria. Which is not going to stop her book – along with Sarah Barns’s on platform urbanism, another excellent account the human experiencing of urban technologies seriously – taking its place among my favourites on digitally-mediated urbanism. Oh, and did I mention that is beautifully written?

Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally-mediated city

Happy to report I have a new paper out, co-authored with Monica Degen. It’s online and open access at Urban Studies and this is the abstract:

Aesthetics, generally understood as an intensified emphasis on the sensorial look and feel of urban environments, has become an important perspective through which urban scholarship is examining the economic, social, political and cultural processes of urban regeneration projects across the globe. Much of this aestheticising work is now mediated by many kinds of digital technologies. The entanglement of digital technologies with the sensorial feel of urban redevelopments manifests in many different ways in different urban locations; it is deeply reshaping the embodied experiencing of urban life; and it enacts specific power relations. It is the focus of this paper. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Jansson, this article develops the notion of ‘textured’ space in order to offer an analytic vocabulary that can describe distinctive configurations of urban experience at the intersection of specific urban environments, bodily sensations, and digital devices. Analysing embodied sensory politics is important because various aspects of bodily sensoria are central to human experiences of, and relations between, both self and other. Hence bodies are enrolled differentially into different expressions of these new urban aesthetics: while some are seduced, others are made invisible or repelled, or are ambivalently entangled in digitally-mediated aesthetic atmospheres. The article offers some examples of the power relations inherent in the textured aesthetics of three of the most significant, and interrelated, processes of contemporary, digitally-mediated urban change: efforts to be seen as a ‘world-class city’ and to facilitate gentrification and tourism.

It takes the argument of our book The New Urban Aesthetic a bit further by drawing on an excellent range of studies by other scholars to look more carefully at the embodied power relations implicit in different examples of digitally-mediated urban aesthetics.

The Kitchen: a review

The Kitchen is a new Netflix movie, directed by Daniel Kaluuya and Kibwe Tavares. It’s an excellent addition to the genre of film in which a working-class London neighbourhood is invaded by hostile outsiders (see also Attack the Block (“INNER CITY VERSUS OUTER SPACE”) and Cockneys versus Zombies (“This city ain’t big enough for the both of them!”), both made around a decade ago).

The Kitchen in the movie is a housing estate in near-future London. Netflix bills The Kitchen as sci-fi, but the Kitchen’s invaders aren’t aliens, as in Attack the Block, or zombies: they’re the police enforcing the evictions that’ll allow the Kitchen to be redeveloped. Zombie and alien invasion films are often taken as metaphors for contemporary concerns: nuclear war, capitalist alienation. In the case of The Kitchen, though, the invasion and destruction of poor neighbourhoods by property capitalism is not allegorised in any way: it is made viscerally real.

This literalism reminded me of something NK Jemisin wrote about her two Great Cities novels. Those books are also about a city being invaded (New York), this time by an actual alien (you know what I mean), and the alien is both convincingly real in terms of the story and clearly metaphorical: white, tentacular, extractive, plugging into bodies and minds to render resistance useless. There are certainly many analogies at work in these two books: the first especially is a great, challenging read. At the end of the second book, The World We Make, Jemisin explains that she intended to write a third but by the time the first was finished, what was actually happening in New York had outstripped satire. “I had to change one of my initial planned plots for this book—a monstrous president waging war on his own hometown—because Trump got there first,” she says. “The Great Cities trilogy that I’d initially planned became a duology because I realized my creative energy was fading under the onslaught of reality”

While it certainly can’t be accused of lacking creative energy, I got the feeling that as a creative intervention, The Kitchen occupies a similar relation to urban change in cities like London and New York, and many more, as do the Great Cities novels. The movie clearly didn’t lack the budget to show aliens or zombies, because the digital visual effects are impressive, but it chose not to: economic, social and political relations and dynamics clearly understandable from our contemporary moment are frightening enough.

I can’t close without saying more about those visual effects, because they are both part of the film as it’s meant to be seen by us spectators – they visualise the near-future city of which the Kitchen is part – and also because onscreen digital images play a role in the film’s narrative. Lots of critics have remarked on the film’s VFX and they are very good. London’s existing built environment seems to have been intensified: the London Eye has been upgraded; the skyline has even more striking tall buildings; the Kitchen is a huge building over which drones hover and sweep. Watching on a tv screen I could see how that urban landscape would scale up impressively in a cinema. There are smaller pleasures too: the vibrant market of the Kitchen has lots of floating glowing signs which look rather lovely; bits of what I looks very much like the actual Barbican complex in London have been modified to become a crematorium (maybe that’s metaphorical).

Digitally-produced images of cities also feature in a key scene in the movie where one of the main characters finally accesses a new apartment provided by the company wanting to redevelop the Kitchen. There’s no actual window in the one-room apartment (the decor of which looks very much like what’s pictured in endless CGIs of new apartments now). Rather, there is a wall-size screen with a selection of aerial urban views of exactly the same kind that property developers now frequently use to sell their apartments: a view from on high of a city at dusk, lit buildings twinkling like urban fairy lights. And the streets of the London we see in the movie are full of billboards picturing new developments in just that style. So it’s not just the physical landscape of this London that’s being reshaped by big developers, but also its visual culture.

I’m probably a bit over-focussed on such things, but it did seem to me that there was a strong and interesting convergence between these computer-generated marketing images and how the city as a whole was pictured in The Kitchen. The VFX are good but they’re not quite at the level of Dune, say, or The Creator, or San Andreas. There was a slightly sketchy quality to them, a slightly washed-out, pale colour palette. While this did make me wonder that perhaps future London has at least benefited from being a low emission zone, I was also strongly reminded precisely of the computer-generated images frequently used by property developers, pitching their apartment blocks in the ever-sunny uplands of property-owning capitalism. Just like the characters are only offered CGI views when they leave the Kitchen, then, so too it felt that as viewers of the film, our vision of the city also has been infected by real-estate-VFX.

There’s a lot more to say about the film, of course. Fantastic acting, rather slow pacing but with some great set pieces, fails the Bechdel test. It’s a fascinating watch, and has certainly given me a lot of food for thought as I ponder the implications of various digitally-created images of urban life.

call for papers: being(s) and difference in digitally mediated cities

Ivin Yeo and I are hoping to organise one or two sessions at this year’s Royal Geographical Society conference in London in late August on the theme of ‘being(s) and difference in digitally mediated cities’. Here is our call for papers!

If “the urban is the embodiment of difference and the machinic production of difference ” (Simone 2022: 16), how are digital technologies entangled in the emergence of urban difference? The digital has become a core feature of contemporary urban life, not only shaping the way inhabitants live and work in the city but also giving rise to new forms of posthuman subjectivity. This session focuses on the multiplicity of the everyday experiencing of digitally mediated cities, exploring the deepening relationships between diverse digital technologies and different forms of urban life and living. More broadly, it seeks to foster discussions in digital and urban geography around what everyday life in digitally mediated cities entails, its accompanying social and political implications, as well as what kind of posthuman urban life is valued in the digital era.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and conceptual papers on topics including but by no means not limited to:

• The political and social implications of the digital mediation of life in cities, including gender, race, dis/ability, class and other forms of difference.
• The atmospheric and affective aspects and implications of urban digital mediation.
• Embodied and embedded accounts of everyday encounters with digital technologies in cities.
• Uneven urban geographies of digital mediation and their implications on everyday life.
• The role of digital technologies in the making or unmaking of posthuman subjectivity.
• Novel methodological approaches for examining the digital mediation of everyday urban life.

We are hoping for 15 minute, in person presentations with plenty of time for discussion. Please send a title, 250-word abstract and your full contact details to Si Jie Ivin Yeo (ivin.yeo@ouce.ox.ac.uk) and Gillian Rose (gillian.rose@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by Wednesday 14 February.

picturing suburban utopia

The images in a newspaper report about plans for a “55,000 acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites” caught my eye at the weekend. The ‘utopia’ is called ‘California Forever‘ and its promotional images are striking. They’re a kind of 1930s graphic-cum-landscape, pastel colours, little shading. Bits remind me of iPad painting software, others of English interwar driving guides. But mostly I thought – they must be generated by AI, a generative AI like Midjourney, Dall-E or Stable Diffusion.

I think there are two reasons for this. One is the visual content. There are weird shapes in every image: look at the green things on the roof of the building in the image above. There’s a canoeing scene in which the figures in the kayak are splodges and the daisies next to them oddly large. In fact, in each of the images on the California Forever website I spotted some strange shape which doesn’t work as a representation of even an imaginary urban space.

Also, there’ is a slightly odd ‘utopia’ vibe to the images which is not dissimilar to something Roland Meyer has identified as typical of Midjourney’s generated images. As Roland has demonstrated, Midjourney seems to like an early- to mid-20th century US public visual culture style (with apologies to any art historians out there wondering what on earth I’m talking about). It’s kind of heroic public art/messaging, but more suburban and, as Roland also showed with his image of a ‘family barbecue in a redwood valley’, with very traditional social content: white straight families, in Roland’s example. Roland also shows how Midjourney’s images can become really strange if expanded. These images of California Forever are much less surreal (overtly anyway); it’s all pastel colours and sunshine and sunsets (hence my reference to a certain kind of English interwar aesthetic). But the very conventional and normative social content remains, albeit specifically West-Coast-ised. It’s all very trad, men installing solar panels, women chatting in the town square. And no mention, textual or visual, of the Patwin tribe who lived on the land when the Spanish arrived.

Why use this visual style? Well, one thought is that there is one other recent proposal for a very large-scale urban redevelopment project which also promises to bring a green utopia to a dry land: Neom’s The Line. When I’ve given various talks about the digital visualisation of new urban development projects, it surprises me how many people mention The Line – and not in a good way (see too the comments made about its YouTube promotional video). The many criticisms of this sort of urban utopia vision might have fed into existing widespread scepticism about computer-generated images of new urban redevelopment projects that go for the ‘photo-real’ sort of look that the Neom promotional materials adopt (although always saturated with a golden glow – there’s something to say here about the aesthetic that Unreal Engine has enabled, I think, too). They are perhaps beginning to look more absurd and even offensive than simply a bit of typical marketing to be cynical about. So maybe the developers of ‘California Forever’ want to distance themselves from that critique and that visual style. (I recall that Google’s images for its ill-fated Sidewalk project in Toronto also used what looked like pen-and-watercolour sketches as well as CGIs in their publicity materials, perhaps for the same reason.)

There are surely other reasons too, though, for the use of these visuals. Not least, that using AI to generate these sorts of illustrative images – if that’s what was done – is surely much cheaper to the developer than paying a visual artist to do the work.

But also, if, as Roland suggests, all you need is a vibe from your image, then AI is your tool. And since urban (re)development is increasingly working with the aesthetic and atmospheric (as Monica Degen and I argue in our book The New Urban Aesthetic), then vibe is indeed what you need. So it’s an interesting moment for the production of images of new development projects. Accuracy or vibe? But of course both are now produced digitally so in some ways it’s no choice at all.

seeing the city digitally, or, animated urbanism

I gave a talk at the Berkeley Center for New Media last November, and the recording and transcript are now available here.

I called the lecture ‘Seeing cities digitally: processing urban space and time – or – animated urbanism’. The first bit of the title was a nod to an open-access book I edited, published last year by Amsterdam University Press. It’s also called Seeing the City Digitally and has what I think is an amazing collection of essays by its contributors. You can find it here.

The second part of the title – animated urbanism – is something I’m working on at the moment, thinking about what it means to live in cities that are increasingly visualised through what Thomas Elsaesser described as the ‘default vision’ of a digital visual culture: urban life as free-floating, anchorless mobility often in non-Cartesian spaces, in a nutshell. The lecture builds on a cluster of advertisements, all but one for apps, that show floating bodies doing just that – the photo above is from a Spotify ad campaign.

Thanks to BCNM for hosting me, the great audience, and to Emma Fraser for chairing. If anyone has other examples of ads that show people flying through urban space, please let me know!

PROXISTANT VISION by Bull.Miletic

Ferriscope

PROXISTANT VISION is an installation by Synne Tollerud Bull and Dragan Miletic, on show at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco til 19 March 2023, but you can get a sense of it from the PROXISTANT VISION website. According to the Museum’s website, the work explores the impact of digital aerial imaging technologies on everyday life, though my sense of it was more that it was a precise dissection of the operation of some of those technologies.

Synne and Dragan created PROXISTANT VISION with curator Carol Covington and various collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of California Berkeley, as part of their PhD research. The installation consists of three, interrelated rooms, each of which plays with the relation between distance and proximity as it is articulated by various technologies. Ferriscope explores what can be seen from urban observation wheels, from the first – immense! the cabins look like railway carriages – Ferris wheel at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, to more recent versions in London, LA and Vienna. Venetie 1111110001 works with various images of Venice, including a map from 1500, a view by Google Earth and photos of the carved wooden blocks used to print the paper map. The third piece, Zoom Blue Dot, occupies the space in the museum between the rooms occupied by Ferriscope and Venetie 1111110001. A robot moves around the space projecting a video showing a Google blue dot from outer space down to the interior of its phone screen pixel display. All the spaces are lit only by these the various projections, and the projecting equipment is explicit and even rather ostentatious: a robot no less but also complicated arrangements of projectors, machinery, mirrors, a revolving rhombicuboctahedron, cables and scaffolding.

Each room has a light box with a QR code that connects to a considered and detailed discussion on what each piece does. Most of the commentaries focus on the notion of proxistance: the zoom in and out, from proximity to distance, each tethered to the other through various aerial imaging devices: the ferris wheel, the satellite, the microscope, the projector. In that sense, this work is cousin to Laura Kurgan’s meditation over a decade ago on being Close Up At A Distance (now available in paperback I notice), although the focus on the urban view and the smartphone gives an important supplement to Kurgan’s arguments I think. It brings bodies into view rather more directly, for example, just as these technologies have become so much more pervasive in everyday experience since Kurgan’s work. This is given rather literal emphasis in the installation as none of the projections are confined to one screen or frame: all fragment and disperse in various ways over the bodies of the museum visitors, so that we too become screens for these projections.

The project website suggests this is all about surveillance, the view of everything – if no longer from nowhere, rather from a specific set of technologies. My experience of the installations though was rather different. Precisely because each installation foregrounds its own technological devices so fully – indeed, its own technicity – it makes it clear that different technological assemblages will generate different versions of proxistant vision. Even the smooth, seamless, incredible zoom from outer space to the components of a pixel have been patched together from different images created by satellites and microscopes. There is no singular aerial view.

Moreover, each installation suggested to me at least that, just as proximity and distance are conjoined, so too is coherent vision and its failure. Each showed a different version of this. Venetie 1111110001 played with scale and glitch: the image of the map and the Google Earth view became fragmented and shards played across the walls of the entire room, mixing up with glitches in the digitised version of the 1500 map and what were probably photos of its wooden printing blocks but might have been something else entirely, and what was also possibly a computer-generated image of Venice flooded. Or not. The robot wandered around doing its own thing, its projection beaming onto different surfaces and reflecting in random ways off of bodies and the mylar surrounding the Ferriscope room. As for the Ferriscope, that projection starts with very slow images – ferris wheels are slow – but speeds up and up until it starts to swing around the entire room and to lose visual recognisability, fragmenting into what the human eye can only see as the red, green and blue of the pixels.

All of this suggests a much more complex visual field than popular notions of surveillance and spectacle assume. It suggests a multiplicity of such views which, because each relies on a specific assemblage of technologies and bodies, don’t align. And it suggests that each contains not only proximity and distance, but other antinomies too: coherence and dispersal; integrity and incoherence; legibility and glitch. These things need to be thought together, it seems to me, and PROXISTANT VISION – or visions – is a generative prompt to do so.

With thanks to the Berkeley geographers who joined me at the Museum of Craft and Design: Emma, Clancy, Maria, Alexis and Fiona.

digital | visual | cultural with Shannon Mattern

Booking for our first event is now live here!

call for papers on assembling smart + social difference for EASST conference

The SCiM team is organising a session at the EASST conference in Lancaster, UK, in July. The conference homepage is here and you can find details of the call for papers here.

The conference will take place from 25-28 July at Lancaster University with the theme “Making science, technology and society together”.  The SCiM team is inviting contributions for a session on Assembling the smart city: exploring the contours of social difference. Smart cities are being figured as meeting places where multifarious things come together gathered by a vision of digital-led urban transformation. We invite papers that follow some aspect of this to better understand how Smart participates in patterning social difference. We seek insight into what sorts of ways of urban life specific versions of Smart make more or less possible; when, where, for whom?

Short abstracts of fewer than 300 characters and long abstracts of fewer than 250 words must be submitted via the conference’s online form (not by email) before midnight CET on February 14th, 2018.

Members of the SCiM team will be there, sharing some of the results of our research into the co-production of smart technologies, policies and practices with various processes of social differentiation both familiar and emergent. Do join us!

images, cities, talk and wonder

One of the things I enjoy most about Sight and Sound magazine is the column written by Mark Cousins. Often quirky and always extraordinarily well-informed, they can be interventions or meditations or enthusiasms – though actually, they are always enthusiasms to one degree or another. (I especially remember a fantastic discussion of Scarlett Johansson’s ability to be slow on screen, which totally made sense of her work and presence, not least in the weird Under the Skin.)

So I was really looking forward to hearing him talk at the excellent Festival of the Future City in Bristol last week. And he was indeed wonderful, talking to a selection of images of cities. Barely an academic reference made, and hugely insightful, using words to pull out particular and striking qualities in his images that a more systematic approach never could. So wonderful in fact that all I wanted to do here was list a few of his phrases. Here they are:

vabble – the visual equivalent of babble                      perspectival plunge

     the city whent it’s too alive, too dense, oppressive. or when it’s dying, toxic, poisonous

am I there yet               the Pompidou Centre is like a cathedral wrapped in elastic bands

           the city as a camera mount                           a centrifugal imagination

At the time, in the moment, they were quirky, eclectic, poetic, funny and powerful: carrying and extending some of the effects of his chosen images into the audience, making us see more and differently. Now I’ve written them down, without the images and outwith Mark’s performance, they don’t seem anywhere near as wonderful. But they were. In the moment they really were. Here’s hoping that his new book, The Story of Looking, achieves something similarly magical.