Introduction
Given the theme of mobility and technology a sensible beginning is to ask what kinds
of mobility can be read into a project that aims to develop Internet `tools' to improve
communication between public administrations and citizens in decisionmaking pro-
cesses to do with urban planning? One obvious kind of mobility is that of mobile
phones in the hands of citizens who from various `real' places could if they wanted
contact local authority officers concerned with the public physical environment (and
transport through it). That kind of mobility is certainly within the scope of the EDEN
(Electronic Democracy European Network)
(1)
project, as outlined later. However we
will be mainly concerned with other kinds. For one thing, to talk about `the project' is
to describe a trajectory, incomplete since it is a thirty-month project and at time of
writing has twenty two of them to run, but along which certain actors and ideas have
already been recruited, assembled, and translated. So a lot of the mobility we will
discuss is abstract, both in the sense that this trajectory is, and in the sense that
messages have a `route' from citizens to authorities and back again, along which
various actors represent those citizens and the places they are concerned with.
We will discuss these two trajectories, of electronic messages from citizens to
administrations, and of EDEN as a project; a project that begins with these messages
as its subject and has `a toolkit that enhances citizens' participation' as its object. A
discussion of this sort may seem a more suitable topic for a technology journal,
except that the social shaping of technologies and spaces is an issue of some concern
to interdisciplinary researchers on the fate of cities and regions (Hinchliffe, 1996;
Representational politics in virtual urban places
Angus Whyte, Ann Macintosh
International Teledemocracy Centre, Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh EH10 5DT,
Scotland; e-mail: a.whyte@napier.ac.uk, a.macintosh@napier.ac.uk
Received 22 November 2001; in revised form 26 July 2002
Environment and Planning A 2003, volume 35, pages 1607 ^ 1627
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 administra-
tion 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 occupa-
tions 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.
DOI:10.1068/a34237
(1)
Summary available at http://www.edentool.org.

Painter and Philo, 1995; Thrift, 1996). Actor-network approaches (Latour, 1987; Law,
1987; Law and Mol, 2001) provide a vocabulary for describing the mobility of the
citizens' `voice in decisionmaking' as it becomes represented in and through the socio-
technical networks of the project. Mostly we will be concerned with the translation of
those voices, the new relations between political representation, the online representa-
tion of views, and questions of representativeness that are implicated in sustaining
EDEN's development.
Most of all we will be concerned with the question `where are the politics?' For the
purpose of this paper we will use `politics' to mean choices pertaining to the status or
influence of people and things. Even with this broad definition, that may seem a
strange question to ask of e`-democracy', a field that normally grafts political science
onto the body of research concerning information, communication, and technology.
Politics are easy to find in the literature on `virtual communities' (Rheingold, 1994)
and, not least, the `information society' (Noveck, 1999). E-democracy typically har-
nesses new technology in general and the Internet in particular to political aims that
have been usefully reviewed by Bryan et al (1998). However, the politics described in
much of the e-democracy literature are located at the end of a trajectory, expressed
in terms of broad political aims that are hard to pin down to changes in practice, since
practices are rarely described. Unfortunately, few published evaluations give examples
of the particular parts played by technology in urban development, or any unintended
or paradoxical outcomes relating to the practices that are intended to be supported
[Thrift (1996), though see Whyte and Macintosh (2001) for an example relating to
`transparency' in public consultation].
The `political' issues we focus on here include some that have been made so far in
the project, and some that affect the forthcoming evaluation of the EDEN software
toolkit. As we will describe in more detail later, the object of EDEN is to deploy
capabilities in computational linguistics, shaped into `natural language processing
modules' that provide the building blocks of a software toolkit. The toolkit is to be
integrated into the existing technical and social infrastructure sustaining city councils'
e-democracy websites and citizens' participation initiatives in five cities. The partners
in the project are `users' of the information technology, communications, or planning
departments of the city administrations of Antwerp, Bologna, Bremen, Vienna, and a
consortium of Polish towns and cities represented by Nisko, and `suppliers', software
companies Yana Research and Omega Generation, whose specialities include the field
of applied computational linguistics known as natural language processing (NLP), and
Public Voice Lab who specialise in research and development of new media in the
public sector. Academic partners are the University of Bremen informatics research
group TZI, the Osvaldo Piacentini Archive, and the authors, whose prime role in the
project is in the stages of `requirements analysis' and `evaluation'.
Once tested, deployed on city websites, and successfully evaluated, the software
toolkit is meant to address certain technopolitical issues that are commonly used as
the basis of e-democracy experiments. The main issue is that citizens everywhere seem
disconnected from the administrations that govern them, or participate in the politics
of planning decisions only when `options' have already become `facts', owing in part to
the remoteness and opacity of decisionmaking and the incomprehensibility of related
planning documents. The assumed infrastructure for EDEN is one in which citywide
intranets or civic networks seem to offer near ubiquitous access from home, public
terminals, and mobile handsets. It is hoped that these provide access for the purposes
of making enquiries and having these responded to competently. Improving access,
comprehension, and procedural transparency should lead (so the argument goes) to
greater participation in planning and acceptance of plans by the `ordinary citizen'.
1608 A Whyte, A Macintosh