Three weeks ago I gave a rapid-fire presentation at the inaugural edition of Ignite Toronto. For those unfamiliar with the format, Ignite presentations are delivered Pecha Kucha style, which is to say 20 slides in five minutes. I used my talk to speed skate over my research interests and highlight a number of current developments in thinking about the representation of urban space. My presentation was entitled Urban Screens and I examined the idea of the mediated city while wondering out loud how citizens could claim ownership of a rapidly evolving urban environment. Thanks to Michele Perras and Peter Horvath for the invitation to speak.

Tonight I am going to talk about one of my main research preoccupations - the representation of urban space. I think this is a topic that is fundamentally relevant to everyone in this room as we are all citizens that are engaged by technology—as designers, problem-solvers and people inhabiting the city we are all implicated in this discussion.

The city as subject is nothing new, see Dickens, Futurism and Modernist literature. One precedent that I keep coming back to the Arcades Project, an undertaking that Walter Benjamin worked on from 1927 until his death in 1940. This writing project was inspired by Benjamin's fascination with the Parisian shopping arcade, an urban typology whose character epitomized broad socio-economic transformations taking place during this time period.

Benjamin used his keen eye and tenacious research skills to develop an urban taxonomy derived from character of the arcades and the broader history of Paris. These retail spaces were distilled down to an index that was used as the basis for some two dozen thematic writing projects. Benjamin used each of these topics to collate information around specific phenomena and experiences.

Jump cut forward 70 years and we are looking at another urban document, one which represents the neighbourhood in which this event is taking place. This is the OpenStreetMap for Parkdale and there are a few characteristics about this document that are worth noting. First, it is a commons—nobody owns it. Secondly, it is user-generated and it is constantly being updated.

At the same time that we see Wiki-type authoring of urban space we can also perceive a visible shift in social media and microblogging web services. Twitter just announced that they will be attaching (the option for) location data to be registered with every tweet. Perhaps we can finally shelve that played out conversation about "the future of journalism" and start thinking about microblogging as a spatial phenomenon.

...and with microblogging of course comes the mobile nation—in case you didn't notice this is happening right now. Ubicomp is becoming less of a buzzword and more of a turf war. We've got telcos, regulatory bodies and hardware and software providers locked in a scrum with us consumers stuck in the middle.

What I've outlined thus far leads in to some of the questions that I'm considering with my research:

• What are the implications of an increasingly geospatial web for cartography and our experience of the city?
• What projects exemplify what the near future holds and who is making them?

That latter question is important because a lot of the most interesting work is happening outside traditional artistic and cartographic practice.

One of my favourite places to look for inspiration is games. Games that are set in or somehow deal with the city have a fantastic capacity for systematizing the geography, infrastructure and rhythms of urban life and encapsulating these parameters in concise simulations that we can quite easily wrap our heads around. In addition to simulation, they also are required to provide graphical systems for wayfinding—also useful points of reference.

It goes without say that not all games are digital and when games take place in the city something magical happens. You've got these demarcated zones and when people enter these spaces they step out of the social contract of the city and into a mutually understood set of rules. Citizens become participants and this enriches the experience of the city for them and spectators alike.

Games aside, a key strategy for thinking about the representation of the city is transliteration, that is reading the city as a text and translating it into another system. This isn't necessarily "literal" but speaks to the practice of codifying urban infrastructural or experiential systems. A perfect example of this is the CityMurmur project which was just (re)launched in New Orleans for SIGGRAPH 2009.

CityMurmur is wildly ambitious, a little poetic and kind of confounding. The web application aggregates a curated selection of city-specific RSS feeds and then uses text analysis to geolocate this content. The city is then remapped as series of topical conversations—discourse becomes the lens through which we consider the cartography of the city.

Another great example of urban taxonomy is One Block Radius, a 2004 project focused on a specific Lower East Side city block in Manhattan. This web-based project provides a browsable archive for a range of photographic, anecdotal and ephemeral material collected at the site.

It isn't a stretch of the imagination to see how projects like CityMurmur and One Block Radius related to commercial web services like EveryBlock. The common thread here is the idea of presenting a generalized urban interface with which to manage information about the city. EveryBlock functions as kind of a meta-aggregator to provide a window into all manner of geodata—crime reports, restaurant health code violations, geotagged photographs and business reviews are all mapped by street and neighbourhood.

This is a project that I worked on in Madrid last fall called In the Air. The endeavour has a few facets, but the primary goal was to create an interface for understanding the air quality of Madrid over a two year period as measured by a network of sensors distributed throughout the city. This "proof of concept" prototype allowed users to quickly assess the fluctuations of intangible environmental data—something that might be quite hard to understand without a visual aid.

This discussion is not strictly limited to visualization, as evidenced by EveryBlock there are many ways in which more nuts and bolts services can help improve our experience of the city. FixMyStreet Canada is a great example of a civic interface whereby citizens can report deficiencies (potholes, broken street lamps, etc.) to the appropriate municipal authorities. These types of tools allow the municipality to tap into the eyes and ears of concerned citizenry and obtain better "intelligence" about the condition of roadways, infrastructure and street furniture.

...and this brings us to the present moment, perhaps even the dawning of a new era. Once again I'll invoke the idea of a mobile nation, whereby those that are equipped with smartphones are now able to use them as "viewing machines" with which to augment their perception of the city.

One of the aspects of Augmented Reality (AR) that interests me the most is the "neat and tidy" transplanting of the notion of the web browser from the screen to the city. This photograph is of Layar, an AR browser for Android. Given the history of web browsers, an "urban browser" suggests proprietary methods for viewing the city and it also suggests the need for standards. (see Thomas Wrobel's recent thoughts on this topic).

In thinking about media in the city, this (The Networked Omniscient) is a scenario that we probably want to avoid—a low-rent version of Minority Report where citizens are bombarded by information related to their geographic location and purchasing habits. (I actually really like this project but it definitely exemplifies how a media-saturated, "intelligent" cityscape might play out)

...and on the other end of the spectrum, this (DIYcity) is example of what we should want. Visualizations, interfaces and web services that facilitate citizens mobilizing around issue and pooling time and expertise to improve the city around them.

Image Credits:

1. Disturbed City - Mattia Casalegno & Michael Langeder [see Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE documentation]
2. Parisian Shopping Arcade - photographer unknown
3. Index of The Arcades Project (left), Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque National - photo: Gisèle Freund (right)
4. OpenStreetMap, map of Parkdale
5. twittervision - David Troy
6. Mobile phone array - photographer unknown
7. -
8. GTA IV, screen capture - Rockstar Games [see previous post]
9. Basketball Game - photographer unknown
10. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities & Venice
11. CityMurmur New Orleans - Writing Academic English
12. One Block Radius - Christina Ray & Dave Mandl
13. EveryBlock - Adrian Holovaty [see previous post]
14. In the Air - Nerea Calvillo & collaborators
15. FixMyStreet Canada - VisibleGovernment.ca
16. New York Nearest Subway, iPhone application - Acrossair
17. Layar Reality Browser for Android - SPRXmobile
18. The Networked Omniscient - Evan Allen & Matthew Worsnick
19. DIYcity - John Geraci
20. JT Switchboard - photo: Joseph A. Carr.