Representational Politics in Virtual Urban Places

Abstract

EDEN, a famous garden, is also an acronym for the Electronic Democracy European Network, a project involving a consortium of public administrations (local authorities), academic institutions and technology companies. The thirty-month project aims to improve communication between the administrations and citizens in decision-making processes to do with urban planning, and at time of writing is in the transition from ‘requirements analysis’ to implementation of a software toolkit. The EDEN project is concerned, amongst other things, with the mobility of messages to and from urban planning officers in public administrations. Mobility, that is, from people ‘outside’ a city administration to people ‘inside’ it via a website, a virtual place from where messages are to be routed to a correct destination. The planning of virtual urban places is a new concern for both urban planners and systems designers working to implement ‘information society’ initiatives. These two occupations and research fields share similar methodologies, models, and artifacts used to intervene in the practices of their clients. This paper describes how the practices through which planning is made political have been represented in the ‘requirements analysis’ of the EDEN toolkit. The politics of the project do not just lie in its objective, the reconfiguring of ‘virtual’ political geographies in parallel with the ‘real’. The distinctions made between virtual and real politics are themselves political. Setting aside any essential differences between the two, we will look instead at the politics of representation and representations embedded in the EDEN project and software.