J'accuse: what use iPhone cities?

As far as the urbanist blogosphere is concerned, the 'networked city' made possible by the iPhone and its applications is the only thing worth talking about. The street as platform... The kind of program a city is... This is where the urban buzz is right now.

And this is a plea for moderation. Look, I know futurology is shiny and exciting, but let's put this in context. Research from Nielsen shows that 10.4 million Britons access mobile internet, which is to say over 80% of the population do not. 6.2 million people use smartphones, but this market is dominated by Nokia (44%) and Blackberry (19%), with the iPhone taking 3rd place with 17%, or about 1.05 million users. As Edward Kershaw, Nielsen's VP of Mobile Media says,

Whilst smartphones get all the media attention it’s important not to overlook what the vast majority of Britons are actually using. It’s easy to be blinded by the hype but this results in a distorted picture of the mobile market.

At a generous estimate, 1 in 10 Londoners use iPhones. This app-tastic networked interactive post-architectural futuropolis? Demographically it's white, it's rich and it's male. Now, that also happens to describe the architectural profession rather well, so it's perhaps not surprising that such a privileged perspective has come to dominate the discourse. But here's a comparison for you: the number of iPhone users in London is broadly similar to the 700,000 Londoners living in housing association properties, and the 750,000 Londoners living in overcrowded conditions.

Political bloggers may be doing a great job analysing affordable housing issues, but urbanists? Architecture bloggers? Hardly a peep. I find this deeply disheartening. Architecture school teaches the most extraordinary imaginative skills yet in such a socio-political vacuum, where the closest anyone gets to political analysis is debating whether Le Corbusier was a fascist. I know y'all want your pretty renderings featured in Wired magazine, but why not use that creativity to "augment reality" in a more progressive way than showing where's the nearest Tube station?

I live in a city of massive inequality, where millions of people are stressed and unhealthy and we struggle to imagine a way to exercise without spending £60/month at Fitness First. I live in a city where house prices are greatly determined by parents' fears of educational inequalities, and where my generation will be at the mercy of landlords for life; I live in a city where too many earn below the London living wage of £7.60 an hour. I live in a city that's fucking political, yet I read the leading blogs in this field and you'd never guess.

Now I too fail to blog about this a fraction as much as I should - do not get me wrong, j'accuse myself; I am the kid who wrote a thesis on the existential nature of dust and I got a bit excited about iPhones too. This is a polemic intended to energise myself as much as anyone else...

Anna Minton writes of the city as political and the urbanist blogo/Tweetosphere listens; plenty of academics are working on these topics although often it's crashingly dull. If technofixes are widely critiqued as a means of addressing climate change, why so much technofetishism in urbanist thinking? If you think an iPhone app can double voter engagement and make big developments more accountable, for god's sake shout about it. But hyperlocal advertising and information about the coolest coffee shop in the neighbourhood is just so much capitalist fluff, so much extra encouragement to consume; so not progressive.

Anthropologically, too, who's actually assessing the extent of the impact of this technocity on people's lives? Where's the empiricism in these blog posts? They all seem to be hypothetical or imaginative rather than ethnographic research of this technology in lived experience. Who's questioning the hype about how revolutionary these technologies are? And, among all this shiny, don't we risk losing sight of the actual, tangible, real spaces people are living in? Shitty bike lanes, muggings, litter and traffic congestion? That's why I liked the Bratton piece I linked to: at least it brought some materiality, some tactility back into this discussion.

In summary: where's the political, the empirical and the embodied in these 'networked cities' essays? One sentence mentioning a need to ensure that the wrong people (who?) don't control (how?) all that data does not incisive analysis make. Architectural theory loves its future cities, its fictional cities, its Ballard and Gibson and CAD and conceptualism. Imagination is great, don't get me wrong.

But imagination alone doesn't make the world a better place.

City-related lectures at LSE this autumn

There are a thousand reasons why the LSE is brilliant, and one is the quality of its evening lectures. The full list is available here, but below are details of the best on urban and spatial topics. I'd like to attend them all, but that'll be easier said than done!

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Running Cities: London in context
Sir Simon Milton, Prof. Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
What is the new administration's vision for London? Speakers discuss how to design and manage the powerhouses of the global economy, assessing London's development compared to the megacities of the world.
Simon Milton was appointed deputy mayor for policy and planning after serving as chairman of London's Local Government Association. Ricky Burdett, chief adviser for the London 2012 Olympics, and Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, are co-editors of The Endless City.

Tues 21 Oct, 18:30 - Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: social order revisited
Prof. Robert Sampson & Prof. Paul Gilroy
A look at classic urban themes as they are manifested in the contemporary city, focusing on social reproduction of inequality, the meanings of disorder, and the link between the two.
Paul Gilroy is Anthony Giddens Professor in Social Theory at LSE. Robert Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair of sociology, Harvard University.

Tues 4 Nov, 13:00 - Big Ideas: Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

Weds 12 Nov, 18: 30 - Desiring Walls
Prof. Wendy Brown
In this lecture, Professor Wendy Brown will draw on discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory to examine the desire for walls in the context of eroding sovereignty. Why the current proliferation of nation-state walls, especially amidst widespread proclamations of global connectedness and anticipation of a world without borders? And why barricades built of concrete, steel and barbed wire when threats to the nation today are so often miniaturized, vaporous, clandestine, dispersed or networked? Why walls now and how are they to be understood? While acknowledging variety in the explicit purposes of the new walls, this project argues for comprehending the recent spate of wall building in terms of eroded nation-state sovereignty. Above all, the new walls consecrate the boundary corruption they overtly contest and signify the ungovernability by law of a range of forces unleashed by globalization.
Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thurs 13 Nov, 18:30 - Our Urban Future: the death of distance and the rise of cities
Prof. Edward Glaeser
Improvements in transportation and communication technologies have led some to predict the death of distance, and with that, the death of the city. In this lecture Professor Ed Glaeser will argue that these improvements have actually been good for idea-producing cities at the same time as they have been devastating for goods-producing places. What, then, does the future hold for our cities?
Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard.

Tues 18 Nov, 18:30 - The Politics of Mobility
Peter Hendy
Sprawl versus dense? Public transport versus private car? This debate will outline how London's transport strategy shapes - and is shaped by - environmental policy, quality of life and political imperatives.
Peter Hendy is commissioner of Transport for London.