Mobile Mapping

This book argues for a theory of mobile mapping, a situated and spatial approach towards researching how everyday digital mobile media practices are bound up in global systems of knowledge and power. Drawing from literature in media studies and geography - and the work of Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey - it examines how geographical and historical material, social, and cultural conditions are embedded in the way in which contemporary (digital) cartographies are read, deployed, and engaged. This is explored through seventeen walking interviews in Hong Kong and Sydney, as potent discourses like cartographic reason continue to transform and weave through the world in ways that haunt mobile mapping and bring old conflicts into new media. In doing so, Mobile Mapping offers an interdisciplinary rethinking about how multiple translations of spatial knowledges between rational digital epistemologies and tacit ways of understanding space and experience might be conceptualized and researched

Ruins of the Smart City:A Visual Intervention

The visual imaginary of the future city is increasingly dichotomised between visions of hyper-technological digital urbanism and the city in a state of ruin, without people, overtaken by nature. These alternating imaginaries key into concerns over urban futures, as questions of sustainability and rising inequality come to bear on urban life. Such binary imaginaries produce volumes of visual material, lauding and critiquing philosophies of newness, endless progress and the city without decline. This article uses an inventive visual methodology to ask how these imaginaries become situated in the everyday ecologies of living. This methodology focuses on several so-called “brownfield” sites in Salford, United Kingdom; and the “smart” Oxford Road corridor in neighbouring Manchester, to playfully and visually map the entanglement of digital urban ecologies, through the themes of wilderness, play, and compost. These three themes relate to the pleasure of urban wilderness described by Rose Macaulay, reflecting on London’s wild ruins after the second world war; the playful contrast between smart urbanism and urban wastelands, understood through interdisciplinary visual methods; and Haraway’s notion of compost as the fertile ground of collaboration that marks a material-semiotic entanglement between place, people, and nature. We investigate how these frameworks reflect the diversity of urban ecology; animals, plants and humans) might provide an alternative vision of how the city could be, a vision built from how the city currently is

Interfacing the (In)Visible:Urban Encounters in the Hidden City

Field Trip, released by Google/Niantic, is one of a growing number of touring apps available on phones, smart watches, tablets, and other mobile devices, that enable users to undertake digitally-supported exploration of (particularly) urban environments. Combining augmented reality, cartographic interfaces and geographic data, these apps offer situated, visual, and geo-locative urban experiences. While one element of touring apps is to connect users to local features, food, historical sites, and other typical tourist attractions, many vaunt their capacity to reveal the secret city, a capacity delivered by the triangulation between the visual, the urban, and the datafied, fostered through digital interfaces. Using urban theory and media theory, this contribution argues that apps like Field Trip reiterate a visual regime of navigation between screens, data, and urban interfaces. Here, urban interfaces are understood as an encounter between discrete objects in a city characterized by flux. This essay refers to specific examples of hidden and ruinous sites in Manchester to draw out the contradictions of apps like Field Trip in relation to the ‘hidden’ city, using Walter Benjamin’s notion of fascination to understand the broader implications of relying upon interface-based tours to navigate and negotiate the politics of urban space. As this paper delineates, this also presents a further contradiction: in order for secret or hidden sites to be made visible to the user, they necessarily become incorporated into multiple systems of classification, and regimes dedicated to making the invisible visible

“Smart” Discourses, the Limits of Representation, and New Regimes of Spatial Data

As “smart” urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that has been gathered by sensors, devices and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable and knowable spaces, facilitating ever-more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration and categorisation of difference, and structured through particular discourses of smartness, both of which shape the production of space and place on a local and general level. Valorization of data and its analysis naturalizes constructions of space, place, and individual that elide the political and surveillant forms of techno-cractic governance on which they are built. This article argues that it is through processes of measurement, calculation, and classification that “smart” emerges along distinct axes of power/knowledge. Using examples drawn from the British Home Office’s repurposing of charity outreach maps for homeless population deportation and the more recent EU EXIT document checking application for European citizens and family members living in the UK, we demonstrate the significance of Gunnar Olsson’s thought for understanding the ideological and material power of smartness via his work on the very limits of representation. The discussion further opens a bridge towards a more relational consideration of the construction of space, place, and individual through the thinking of Doreen Massey

Playful mapping in the digital age:The Playful Mapping Collective

From Mah-Jong, to the introduction of Prussian war-games, through to the emergence of location-based play: maps and play share a long and diverse history. This monograph shows how mapping and playing unfold in the digital age, when the relations between these apparently separate tropes are increasingly woven together. Fluid networks of interaction have encouraged a proliferation of hybrid forms of mapping and playing and a rich plethora of contemporary case-studies, ranging from fieldwork, golf, activism and automotive navigation, to pervasive and desktop-based games evidences this trend. Examining these cases shows how mapping and playing can form productive synergies, but also encourages new ways of being, knowing and shaping our everyday lives. The chapters in this book explore how play can be more than just an object or practice, and instead focus on its potential as a method for understanding maps and spatiality. They show how playing and mapping can be liberating, dangerous, subversive and performative

Mobile Mapping

This book argues for a theory of mobile mapping, a situated and spatial approach towards researching how everyday digital mobile media practices are bound up in global systems of knowledge and power. Drawing from literature in media studies and geography - and the work of Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey - it examines how geographical and historical material, social, and cultural conditions are embedded in the way in which contemporary (digital) cartographies are read, deployed, and engaged. This is explored through seventeen walking interviews in Hong Kong and Sydney, as potent discourses like cartographic reason continue to transform and weave through the world in ways that haunt mobile mapping and bring old conflicts into new media. In doing so, Mobile Mapping offers an interdisciplinary rethinking about how multiple translations of spatial knowledges between rational digital epistemologies and tacit ways of understanding space and experience might be conceptualized and researched