Abstract
The Velib bike rental system is worth analyzing in order to understand how cities move out of a model of large infrastructures towards a personal service principle connected to digital traceability and mapping of all activities. The new offer of bikes distributed all over the city creates a new map for access to mobility resources while introducing citizens to a “personal-public” device. Each feature of the system requires a very well designed information system to match the needs for bikes and to charge the users through cards (credit or transportation cards). Personal data is the essential entity that fuels the whole system and that creates potential privacy problems as well as monetization opportunities. The paper relies on a theoretical framework, called habitele, which accounts for the process of inhabiting that is now extended to the personal data ecosystem. The portability of mobile phones (and other devices such as cards) creates an envelope that follows the urban citizen and equips all his activities while it makes a new layer of the city appear, adapted to the personal involvement in the urban environment.
Highlights
The Vélib-type bicycle system is quite common in cities around the world. Many of these cities decided during the last 10 years to follow the examples of Rennes (1998), Lyon (2005) and Paris (2007), trying to avoid the failures of Berlin’s Call a Bike
As an agent in a collective activity, he is computed as a dot moving from one station to another without any attributes. He becomes an element in a model or in a dataset that will be used for various purposes, some of which are not related to the bike activity, since these data may account for other patterns interesting other ields of business or of civic interest
We followed the major mediations that make the system work and comply with the habitele cohesiveness. It appears that service providers are mainly guided by technical ef iciency and inancial bene its, they cannot avoid looking for a seamless system that deeply changes the experience of the city. This is where the habitele model helps us understand what is at stake: the production of an envelope that urbe
Summary
The Vélib-type bicycle system is quite common in cities around the world. Many of these cities decided during the last 10 years to follow the examples of Rennes (1998), Lyon (2005) and Paris (2007), trying to avoid the failures of Berlin’s Call a Bike. Access is a mantra for socio-technical visionaries such as Jeremy Ri kin: it is a major feature of the experience of inhabiting a city that depends strongly on the quality of the personal data sphere that is built around the user This is why the conceptual framework of habitele (BOULLIER, 2011a, 2012) can help decipher the changes that are affecting the urban landscape and urban behaviors. These af iliations create a new web of relationships, some of them supposedly private and others deliberately public, while these boundaries become increasingly blurred and challenge the rules of privacy These afiliations may rely on mobile phones per se and on other physical and virtual service access methods such as credit cards, keys, dedicated applications, and credentials of various kinds. The concept of habitele is strongly connected to urban issues because it extends the human capacity of inhabiting to this web of digital af iliations, transforming, for instance, an individual into a “Vélib user”, traced through the provider’s service database
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