Creating mobile media and social change?

Abstract

This chapter deals with the question of how social communication via mobile media informs practices in urban space and creates social relations. As people engage with public space interactively via mobile media, public space itself becomes ‘reactive’. In considering this development within design processes, architects and planners begin to gain basic knowledge on the general role of networked objects. It is convenient to start this by looking at mobile phones, since they play a key role today in dynamically interfacing the personal with the public. An example of such an interface would be, for example, navigation through an urban space that is strongly informed by mappings of mobile data provided by the user. The use of GPS, surveillance cameras and mobile applications has shifted the user’s perception of public space. This chapter explores social practices from different fi elds, though all of them use mobile media to produce and use public spaces as counter-spaces (cf. Knierbein, Chapter 3 this volume), spaces to win back public space for participatory practices. Many of the examples described in this chapter have been developed following the inspiration of the open source movement where users accessing and sharing knowledge in order to develop joint ideas is the core priority. Many of the examples mentioned, therefore, are developed through Open Source software accessible to every user. The term ‘Commons’, as a shared resource with a collective owner, will be introduced in order to talk about any overlaps between participatory tendencies in digital space and urban space. Both foci aim to redistribute means of production and of re-production. The fi rst section of this chapter looks critically at the way users expose data about themselves and their location through mobile media. The question of who collects and uses this data leads to a variety of answers and the clear demand for open and inclusive information infrastructures. A playful exercise will introduce students to a participatory practice that connects digital with urban space by tactically sharing data only on a specifi c site. This section aims to bring in examples of digital practice implemented through mobile media and designed to win back public space. The entire second section of this chapterwill be dedicated to Open Culture, the sum of all products generated and shared through Open Source tools and therefore in the public domain. It describes the potential of using mobile phones in a different way, and how this new form of usage could encourage empowerment and emancipatory practices in public space. Finally, the examples of projects that use Open Source software to create mobile media raise the question of how marginalised areas are affected by the phenomenon of an increase in the spread of mobile media. Do practices of Digital Commons infl uence public space in these areas so that they become more urban? The last part tries to combine principles of Urban and Digital Commons in the search for inclusive concepts of producing public spaces. It suggests exercises for students in architecture and planning that help them to experience for themselves how urban space and mobile media might inform each other. As described by the editors in the introduction, this book engages with relational conceptions of space, understanding space as an outcome of the specifi c mutual relations between people and places, and their contexts. This chapter aspires to contribute to the book’s aim of developing a specifi c relational perspective on public space by opening the term ‘public space’ to all incidents of sharing taking place in a physical or digital public. Each exercise in this chapter is related to one of the described projects encouraging students to think of urban commons (unrestricted access to land) as informed by digital commons and vice versa. We hope hereby to start a debate on how planners and designers can actively enhance the conditions for sharing in a public context via user-centred digital arts and activism.