Daily Diigo Public Link 12/29/2007
– description of re-purposed spaces (esp’y banks no longer in use) for creative space (Yokohama)
Technology Review: Mapping Professional Networks
– more on reality mining…?
Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places (PDF)
The abstract: “The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. Portable informational objects reshape and personalize the affordances of urban space. Laptops transform cafés into personal offices. Reward and membership cards keep track of individuals’ use of urban services. Music players and mobile devices colonize the in-between times of waiting and transit with the logic of personal communications and media consumption. Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities.”
Locative_Commons.pdf (application/pdf Object)
– 5-page PDF by Marc Tuters; relates to / mentioned in Mobile City blog entry on locative media/ Starbucks vs. Boulevard culture, urbanism. “At stake is not only setting the terms for public access to the vast databases of open source information but constructing the sustaining architecture to do so. If in the construction of the public nation state, the 19th Century was defined by railroads and early tele-communications networks and 20th Century the development of the social safety nets, then the 21st Century will be recognised for making available the digital domains to the public at large in the tradition of furthering our concept and implementation of democracy.”
Mimi Ito – Statics: Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places
– portal page to PDF on locative media, chapter for “The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices”
The Mobile City » Blog Archive » Towards a Starbucks-urbanism? Annotated
– discussion of Starbucks coffee house culture as locative networked culture where people “camp” with their media (laptop etc) to work, network, inform themselves — but they’re not by a long shot isolating themselves from other people. In fact, they choose these locations b/c of what they offer in terms of ambience, connection with others, feel, and culture. Calls into question Habermas’s bleak assessment of the death of coffee house culture…
Retailing | Birth, death and shopping | Economist.com Annotated
Interesting article (can’t figure out who the author is), which traces the history of the mall via Victor Gruen through to “lifestyle centre” rebirth (Rick Caruso). Eg: “Just as the onward march of malls began to seem unstoppable, though, things began to go wrong. In just a few years they turned from temples of consumption to receptacles for social problems.” = which parallels what happened to city cores previously.
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