[courses]

MR+D Mobiliy and Urban Design graduate seminar, SCI_Arc

[10.2006]

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Im(Mobility) Research + Design
MR+D Seminar, Syllabus Version 1
Benjamin H. Bratton
SCI_Arc
Summer 2003


POV shot
Merhan Karimi Nasseri is a stateless Iranian native who, by a twist of fate, was forced to live for 11 years at Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport while awaiting a change in his citizenship status. Nasseri had been previously granted a refugee passport by Brussels but lost the document in a 1988 Paris mugging and was thrown into a French prison for lacking proper immigration papers. After his release he tried to board a plane out of France but was refused for lack of documents and then denied exit from the airport by French authorities, obliging him to make his home on a bench in Terminal One at Roissy.



Mobility

The capitalization of urban space drives an acceleration of production, circulation and consumption that ultimately overwhelms traditional durable space until "all that is solid melts into air. Mobility names the relative movement and fixidity of persons, goods, capital, publics, and communication

We are interested precisely in the contradictions that mobility signals, in the conditions that transpose circulation into inertia, movement into mediation, and publics into cargo. Our research and design problematic is rooted in these connections and disconnections between capital flow, biographical and bodily displacement and the conception of urban technologies in their image.

Mobility requires infrastructure, and we are particularly interested in the circuit between the infrastructures of mobility located in the urban fabric (transportation, for example) and their relocation onto the individual (the mobile phone/computer, for example). The focus of research and the condition of design lies in the urban interface between environment and body, and the multiple potentialities for mobilization and immobilization they contain.

The ideology of speed-as-liberation does not animate this investigation. Attention is always on the specificity of mobility as a variable condition from fixed to fluid, one that determines inertia as much as movement. Accordingly, while the modes of mobilization defines in the research section below are interdependent, they are not interchangeable. Each contributes to and also frustrates the production of others, sometimes an analogous mobilization, sometimes as a frozen state. Across these is the city.

Research
Research will organize connections and disconnections between six modes of urban mobilization: mobility and capital, mobility and communications media, mobility and subjectivity, mobility and objects, mobility and publics, mobility and architectonic forms.

Mobility and Capital
Cities, ancient or freshly minted, materialize as capital investment. World markets circulate financial capital at a rate of $15 million per second. This hyperliquidity, sometimes verging on a virtualization, is the lifeblood of urban forms, however fixed or mobile they are themselves. What are the ramifications of radical capital mobility on the criteria of successful urban design? What needs does fast capital demand on its own behalf?

mobility and communications media
Cities afford proximity to people, to ideas, to capital, to communities, but these functions are being augmented, if not replaced, by emergent communications media and infrastructures. Over the last five years, the remarkable proliferation of mobile phones throughout the world ?not just the "first world- has shifted the condition of connection from fixed urban location to an increasingly complex distribution of mobile users in network space. The mobile phone becomes a remote control for the world, and the first computer that most people will possess will be handheld, and you will talk to it. But perhaps the key interface-driven mobilization is driving itself, a system through which personal dislocation is realized and registered in the manipulation of a visual-mechanical feedback system. Is this the primal scene? How are urban conditions encoded into mobile devices and what impact does this have on the design of stable and unstable geographies? What are the limit conditions of modeling the city as an interface and the interface as a city?

Mobility and Subjectivity
Conventionally, identity is a function of location. We are each from somewhere, live somewhere, etc. Self is locatable on a map. But the incessant displacement of travel, of moving between cities and even countries, conditions a schizophrenic subjectivity. The contemporary nomad, corporate executive or migrant refugee, lives in several worlds at once, and must accommodate the demands that each makes on him as a social subject within them. Mobile subjectivity is a function of both the condition of itinerancy and the demands it makes and possibilities it offers on the fashioning of self. Technologies of individuation, personalization and customization can modulate how the city addresses people as individuals, and how they can bring their own logics of intersubjective address to bear on the city as site of personal agenda and itinerary. What kinds of urban media can and do accommodate mobile subjectivity? How are fundamental urban functions, being reconstructed in the image of unstable, migrant populations? How can these be coordinated to compliment these emergent conditions?

Mobility and Objects
Mobility is the trial and judgment of the ordinary thing.  The career of the most humble commodity is one of international origin and global circulation. Heidegger identified this figure of the thing decades ago, one in which the very transportation of the world becomes its objectification, one in which place is overtaken by displacement. This trajectory of flow is generalized by Castells and others as our state of things. What ramifications does this have for the city, now figured as a conduit for the mediation of inanimate goods? From "all roads lead to Rome, to "all packages go through Memphis! How do the "aesthetics of logistics objectify posthuman forms in useful ways (smart mobs)?

Mobility and Publics
According to J. G. Ballard, flying is now our most important civic duty. Arriving, trafficking and  departing, urban populations churn and flock according to infrastructure provided them. The urban condition is, some have argued, only really a function of transportation. The arteries that link centers, peripheries and other uncitable zones of attraction, are the skeletal system of the urban experience. Network technologies translate the functions of centralization and decentralization, simultaneously vacating the functions of proximity that drive the urban core and producing new kinds of transurban "tunnel effects whereby bandwidth determines nearness in network space, not geography. What are topologies of contradiction that merge and separate the network and urban layers of space? How can cities be refashioned in according to the spatial wants and needs of populations in constant local and global migration: choreographies of the disembedded.

Mobility and Architectonic Forms
According to Mayan legend, as filtered through William S. Burroughs, we the earthlings are "here to go; our purpose is to move, to escape, to jettison vessels. The United States government has (still) a "space program into which they invest billions of dollars annually. Here in the midst of our everyday lives urban forms try, often unsuccessfully, to keep pace with us. When is the architecture in the image of mobility one that does keep pace with its inhabitants, reacting to them, meeting them halfway, and when is it to keep still, to be an embankment into which flow wears grooves? To what extent to communications networks consume both modes of architectural functions, as both a city that is already there wherever you go, and as the platform of going? Is all culture, finally, airport culture?


Notes 1: Mobile Subjects
The law privileges the fixed subject to the mobile one, even as society does the opposite. The modern notion of self and identity has developed in the image of fixed geographical, linguistic and genealogical relations. The passport, that universal medium of personal identity as a condition of mobility, individuates each of us according to the legal prescripts of a nation-state, a biographical image and  stamps of the various states through which we have passed. Our own states issue us similar identification media that further specify us as locatable at a particular street address.

Social economies see us differently. Nomadic subjects, migrant workers of all class positions, move through geographic positions in systemic patterns unreflectable by discourses of the fixed subject. There are direct if not interchangeable interrelations between the mobility of bodies through global space, and the fluidity with which each of us comes to necessarily hold and perform multiple different subjectivities, even over the course of a day. The historical condition of porous space is simultaneous with the condition of multiplied selves. However, the nomadic subject is not necessarily deterritorialized. She may in fact be, like the Filipina maid in Singapore, held prisoner to her dislocated state and status.

Displacement is biographical, temporal. It is not 3000 miles from Los Angeles to New York, it is five hours. Designing for the mobile subject/ subject of mobility requires the experimental reversal of the privileged, perspectival identifications of fixidity. The synchronic abstraction of home as a discrete self-storage envelope, and of self as a singularization of location (home address) does not provide a reliable portrait of displaced subjectivity. In different way, we take home with us as we move, perhaps as data, or media, or language, or evangelical duty. And so, if mobility is now our primary state of embodiment, and stillness the occasional state, shouldn't our official identification media display not our address, but our phone numbers?



Notes 2: Cell Cities
Even as "community is linked to place,  the history of ?communication' is one of mediation, reterritorialization and the dislocation of proximity. But media do not unmake place, in fact quite the opposite. The technological condition of communication contributes directly to the forms into which cities evolve. In her essay, "Telephony, Sadie Plant remarks that "The fixed line telephone changed the architecture of its day, making new constructions, new spaces and new urban relationships possible. The classic example is the skyscraper, which would have been unthinkable without the telephone ? all those telegraph boys running up and down between floors or continually using the elevators to take messages would have made the internal traffic problems insurmountable. Is it possible that the psychogeographical landscape ? and even the actual geography ? of the city will change once again to suit the new possibilities of mobile communication?

A traditional, and unambiguously "urban conception of mobility locates infrastructure in the mechanical, transportational movement of bodies.  This mobilization of publics dedifferentiates individual needs for movement into broad vascular flows. But as the reliance on the automobile in Los Angeles makes clear a more individuated, point-to-point model of personal mobilization can also determine urban fluidity. The Aramis project in Paris beautifully chronicled by Bruno Latour, attempted to split the difference with a Personal Rapid Transit system (PRT) that would modulate from individual and mass movement according to network conditions, it combined the efficiency of a subway with the flexibility of an automobile. But in the end, its electronic couplings proved too complex and expensive, the political will failed, and the project died in 1987.

The incredible proliferation of mobile telephony/ computation intertwines the individualization of mobility and the virtualization of communicative place, allowing bodies to remain in place to utilize a handheld medium as an interface to transurban addressability. Clearly, this hyperindividuation of access to one another simultaneously amplifies one's ability to drift across the globe and still be addressable, inside one's social position, at home everywhere, and also quiets apparent necessity for movement as more of the social world can be addressed not by proximate location but telephonically.

For most of the world, one's first computer will be handheld, and will be telephonic. This mobile, directly embodied form of communication intelligence refigures urban environments as stages and interfaces, cities as media, economies as communication. From Manhattan to Mogadishu, there has been, over the last decade, an explosion in the complexity  and ubiquity of wireless media. This partially redirects attention and concern for public infrastructure from mechanical transportation systems to an emergent "wireless commons, and the strong, open backbone technologies they require, such as truly open, accessible WiFi networks as perhaps of equal social importance as orderly, open public roadways.

Wireless culture tends to circumvent centralization, but not in all ways. Instead of bringing people to the architecture, it brings architecture to people-in-motion. Wireless systems make complex coordination across vast spaces much easier, thereby making site-specificity less important as any site becomes available as a temporary center of operations. Emerging alongside these as urban interface and as infrastructure of the self are unique problems and opportunities for designers willing to explore them, are new modes of self, communication, organization, and structure.

As portable home or spatially specific interface, the variable circuits between infrastructures of the self and infrastructures of city drive the design of media of mobility.

When I think about the past 10 years, I realize that it is all wasted time.
--M.K. Nasseri, Roissy.FR

 
Design

From the encoding and embodiment of urban conditions into portable, personal media, to the reconception of the architectural envelope for a public in perpetual rapid transit, we will define the range of scales through which urban mobility and mobilization can be interconnected,

We will coordinate five groups, each of which will focus on a particular scale condition, each specified according to the six modes of mobilization/ research problematics cited above. The five groups are, at hand, at rest, in motion, at attention, in play.

At hand: Handheld devices
The city encoded into mobile interface, point and click urbanism, my phone is my home, I lose my phone > I lose my right to speak, the world's first (or next) computer will be handheld, form follows fiction, electronic leash, use case modeling and interface functional specification documents, rapid prototyping, gaming metaphors, branding habits.

At rest: Furniture
Coming to rest, urban surfaces as temporary respite zones, the temporary comradery of the itinerant, humane cabin spaces, Herman Miller as theorist of inertia, comfortable smart mobs.

In motion: Kiosk
Individuated communication surfaces, interface-driven infrastructure, dashboard epistemology, preferences city planning > urban interfaces that follow users from city to city, database-driven cinema.

At attention: Display
POV transurbanism, inhabitants as audience, communicative surface as public cinema, branded space, before economies are markets they are first stories, disclosure, enclosure and displacement, you are here, here you are.

In play: Retail
Aesthetics of logistics = storage as display, display as storage, total brand envelope, city as retail interface, retail as urban interface, interface as retail city, from store to storage, miraculous alignments and quality vortexes, the contemporary big box boutique, ice cream trucks and Amazon.

 
The (Im)Mobility Symposium, September 2003, SCI_Arc
At the conclusion of the seminar students will present their final research papers in a formal symposium that I will organize for September 2003. This will take place either at SCI_Arc or at a local gallery. Students will have 15 minutes to present their work and may use all media of their choice in presentation. Studio projects may be included in the presentation, but the final term paper (3000 words) must be submitted for seminar grade prior to the symposium.

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Seminar Structure

Week 1: Introduction to the Seminar.

Mobility Research + Design: Media, Reflexive Modernization, Subjectivity

Week 2: Modernity and the Oblique Subject
?    Michel De Certeau, "Walking in the City
?    Charles Baudelaire, excerpts from "Flowers of Evil
?    Elias Canetti, excerpts from Crowds and Power
?    Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, excerpts from Arcades Project
?    Martin Heidegger, "The Thing
?    Le Corbusier, "Airplanes
?    F.W. Marinetti, "Futurist Manifesto
?    Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, excerpts from The Function of the Oblique

Students will choose four of the above readings and prepare a 1000 word paper!

Week 3: Cell Theory 1
?    Sadie Plant, "On The Mobile and "Telephony
?    George Myerson, Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone
?    Mieke Gerritzen ,Geert Lovink, et al., Mobile Minded


Week 4: Cell Theory 2
?    Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
?    James Katz et al., Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance

Students will choose six chapters of their choice from Katz
Students will prepare a 1000 word paper on the Cell Theory readings

Guidelines questions for Midterm Mini-Symposium and Examination handout to students

Week 5: Interface Theory and Practice
?    David Benyon et al., Conceptual Modeling for User Interface Development
?    Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Design Noir, The Secret Life of Electronic Objects
?    JoAnn T. Hackos, Janice C. Redish, User and Task Analysis for Interface Design
?    Hugh Beyer, Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Design
?    Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication
?    Various texts by Joy Mountford, Brenda Laurel, Terry Winograd, Abigail Sellen

Handheld cinema, lecture by Benjamin H. Bratton.

Joy Mountford visit?

Week 6: Midterm Mini-Symposium and Examination

Students will present a 10-minute paper that combines their first two papers according to guidelines questions

Week 7: Wireless Cultures
    Guest Lectures: Numair Faraz, Xeni Jardin, 34 N 118 W.

Week 8: Brand Spaces, Brand Networks
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Planning literature

Rebeca Mendez visit?

Week 9-10: Transurbanism, Global Flows, Network Epistemes
?    Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy
?    Arjun Appadurai, interview- "The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination
?    Diller + Scofidio. "Suitcase Studies
?    Excerpts from .David Pascoe, Airspaces,
?    Saskia Sassen, Stephen Graham, et al. Global Networks, Linked Cities, pp. 1-144.
?    Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, 19-46, 99-124
?    John Thackera, "Flow, Doors of Perception 2002 keynote


Recommended Readings
?    Marc Aug?, Non-Places
?    M. Castells, The Space of Flows
?    Georg Simmel, "Metropolis and Mental Life
?    J. G. Ballard, "Manhole 69

?    Denise Calls Up, film

Week 12: Mobile Architecture
    Guest Lecture by Dora Epstein and/or Jennifer Seagal  on Mobile Architecture
    Discussion, Readings TBD

Week 13: Final Mobility Symposium

Students will present final seminar papers in a formal symposium format. 15 minutes per paper, see (Im)Mobility Symposium section above.

?
Required Email Lists:

Please subscribe to the following wireless technology email lists. These provide a detailed overview of current initiatives relating to mobile technologies of information exchange.

?    Fierce Wireless, http://www.fiercewireless.com/
?    Unwired (invite only, will try to get everyone on)
?    802.11 Report (http://www.80211report.com)
?    Netttime  http://www.nettime.org/

Tags: mobility, sci-arc, bio media

Published: 10.21.2006

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