Performing the City: Exploring the Bandwidth of Urban Place-Making through New-Media Tactics

Abstract

Discourses on political participation, urban studies, innovation, and ICT development are becoming more and more entangled. Although social and cultural studies have rec-ognized the importance of material entities in organizing and performing civic engage-ment for quite some time (see, for example, Marres 2011), we can also observe how the notion of publics is gaining more and more influence in the fields of design and techno-logical development (see, for example, Le Dantec 2012). Within the context of urban-ity, much falls into the realm of " smart cities, " but the notion of " smart " is contested. We have heard about the number of people with Internet access, the number of devices talking to each other, and the potential revenue achievable for future service provid-ers over and over again. It is not surprising that a transaction-based business rhetoric prevails, but we can also observe how the potential of networked communities, online or offline, is becoming an increasingly important factor in debating the concept of " smart cities. " Halpern (2005), for example, understands the combination of ICTs and networked communities as a form of social capital, and his take on smartness, which is shared by many others, stresses the potential of local interaction: … ICT networks may have great potential to boost local social capital, provided they are geo-graphically " intelligent, " that is, are smart enough to connect you directly to your neighbors; are built around natural communities; and facilitate the collective knowledge. (ibid., 509–510). This takes us one step beyond a mere technology-centered perspective. Furthermore, we can, together with Marres (2011), claim that participation is located in everyday material practices and that these are connected with other modalities of action, such as innovation or democratization. In this respect, material participation challenges the long-prevalent assumption that " the notion that participation can in principle be contained in a singular space of political or moral engagement (i.e. a public debate forum) " (ibid., 514). Participation in publics " takes place. " Whereas spaces might be stumbled upon, places are produced and constructed, and today such spatial prac-tices are diverse and intersecting in cities. When different people and organizations develop their own spatial practices, the same urban space will be subject to diverging From Making Futures by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson, and Richard Topgaard (eds.) – MIT Press, 2014. CC:BY-NC.