ABSTRACT
Today’s cities are teeming with mobile communication. Our interest in the design and uptake of mobile media is to do with its potential to both read and write the city by annotating and informing the mappings and readings of urban space. A growing body of research is emerging on how mobile technologies are taken up by different interest groups, such as the Occupy Movement (CostanzaChock 2012; New York Times 2012) and public locatively mediated protest; in relation to personal identity, such as teens’ uses of cell phones (Ito 2009); and primarily in relation to information, navigation, and the push of services in the context of the mediated city (Hjorth et al. 2012). This research is racing to keep up with the burgeoning spread of mobile applications or “apps” in daily life in urban settings. Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that we live and work in what we call the “networked city” (Campbell 2012; Graham and Marvin 2001; Rainie and Wellman 2012) that is a blend of the physical and digital. Our built urban settings are now infused with social media and information communication technologies that are manifested, culturally and communicatively, through our own productive engagement-such as the use of digital urban screens (Pop et al. 2012) and the use of media players and smartphones in urban space (Bull 2005; de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). Mobile apps such as Foursquare allow users to check in to a location and to broadcast their location to friends; mixed and augmented reality tools such as Layar facilitate the meta-annotation of urban spaces. We are now also witnessing the rapid spread of locative social media such as these being connected to Facebook and Google in wider discursive networks. These developments have occurred alongside an emerging and now solid body of research into locative media and place-specific computing (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011; Lemos 2010; Messeter 2009), including ubiquitous aspects (Dourish and Bell 2011) and occasionally planning (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011). Yet there is still scant research that critically explores relations of locative and social media to the mapping and design of cities (e.g., Speed and Southern 2010; Shepard 2011, Morrison et al. 2013). This is our primary interest in this chapter. We characterize this as cultural mapping akin to that already covered in cultural geography (Roberts 2012). In linking mobility,
mobile communication, and locative media, we situate cultural mapping within an urbanism of the networked city. This is why the concept is used somewhat differently to the more mainstream one applied in cultural geographic resource mapping and cartography. In our usage, cultural mapping on the one hand covers mapping practices that are essentially creative and experimental readings of urban space, but also relating to architecture and the design of cities. On the other hand, it encapsulates mapping “features” as culturally co-constructed and integral to actual mapping performance in the field. The term therefore refers to more participative and dynamic representational roles that mobile media open up, at the same time as it captures prevalent practices and attitudes of urban living. This concerns our persistent involvement in everyday urban matters through the performance of both active interpretation and subjective intervention that may now also be extended to locative and social media tools and emergent practices of “reading and writing” how we perceive, shape, and experience the city via social media and related place-based communication. These communicative activities are enabled by locative media applications and the affordances of smartphones. However, as we discuss below, they are also realized through our actions and how we go about participative cultural mapping-similar to grassroots or bottom-up approaches (Crawford 2008)—in contrast to being recipients of top-down urban planning. In the design, teaching, and research we report on below we connect the quickly expanding domain of mobile media to an experimental research inquiry into locative media. This inquiry transposes a previous established and well-tried paper-based and face-to-face method for cultural urban mapping into an application for locative, mobile mapping (Morrison et al. 2012a). This inquiry takes place as part of a large research project called YOUrban that looks into social media, the city, and performativity. As part of the project a collaborative and interdisciplinary team-including researchers from urbanism and architecture, communication design and informatics, media and interaction designers, as well as a mobile software company-developed a collaborative urban mapping platform in the form of an iPhone application called Streetscape. We built Streetscape to explore the potential of using locative mobile media as a tool for developing experimental forms of collaborative cultural mapping in urban settings. Streetscape goes beyond traditional cultural resource mapping in that it allows users to identify and apply experimental, locative, and mobile mapping perspectives established in urbanism so as to investigate ways of looking at and engaging in active agencies of selection and annotation. In this way Streetscape is a prompt for thinking about how cities are designed and choreographed (Corner 1999) and curated (Bunschoten 2001). As part of its experimental design and development, the app was used and evaluated in a large master’s-level class in urbanism that enabled active productive participation by groups of students of architecture. In the following sections we offer reflections on the design and use
of the first version of Streetscape, primarily based on evaluation material from testing the app in a workshop with sixty students in August 2011. One of the key questions we investigated was how acts of urban mapping might be influenced when transposed to a mobile app. We were also motivated to use Streetscape to heuristically examine the potential for the further development of apps for cultural mapping in urban contexts. As part of a wider investigation into social media, the city, and performativity called YOUrban, we co-designed and developed Streetscape as a locative mobile application. Behind this app lay experience in using a paper-based experimental mapping methodology from Urban Gallery (developed by Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA 2001). In Streetscape we transposed this tool into a GPS-based mapping tool for the iPhone (Morrison et al. 2012a; Morrison and Aspen 2013). Our aim was to see how the four perspectives of Urban Gallery-Erasure, Transformation, Origination, and Migration-might be used to develop what we have called cultural mapping of the networked city. This mapping is based on Points of Interest or POIs, a convention now widespread in mobile maps, to locate image, text, and tags in the context of a mapped city. Actual mappings of the city are carried out onsite and through movement; and the author and others may access these mappings similarly. It is the exploratory reading and “writing” of the city that marks these activities as cultural mappings onsite and on the move-that is, informationally, interactionally, and interpretatively. The chapter proceeds as follows: We start out by presenting urban mapping as a context for our research and design and we locate the app in a locative media context. Thereafter we give a short description of the Urban Gallery methodology on which we drew in designing Streetscape. In the second part of the chapter we look more closely into the design and functionality of the actual app and then present reflections upon its design and use. We include screengrabs of the app and photos of contexts of use. We end by presenting what we see as key issues in a discussion of potential for further development of locative media as tools for creative and experimental urban mapping. We suggest that through locative and mobile media our understanding of our urban spaces and lives may be more fully understood as environments that can be culturally mapped, dialogically and collaboratively. This may be conducted in relation to place specifics and to the emergence of unscripted features and occurrences that we identify, negotiate, and share, differing considerably in tone from our experiences as city dwellers embedded in the predominant and often seemingly distant discourses of urban planning.
