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Textbook Ebook Platform Urbanism Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities 1St Ed 2020 Edition Sarah Barns All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Platform Urbanism Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities 1St Ed 2020 Edition Sarah Barns All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Platform Urbanism Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities 1St Ed 2020 Edition Sarah Barns All Chapter PDF
Platform Urbanism
Negotiating Platform Ecosystems
in Connected Cities
Sarah Barns
Geographies of Media
Series Editors
Torsten Wissmann
Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning
University of Applied Sciences
Erfurt, Germany
Joseph Palis
Department of Geography
University of the Philippines Diliman
Quezon, Philippines
Media is always spatial: spaces extend from all kinds of media, from
newspaper columns to Facebook profiles, from global destination
branding to individually experienced environments, and from classroom
methods to GIS measurement techniques. Crucially, the way informa-
tion is produced in an increasingly globalised world has resulted in the
bridging of space between various scalar terrains. Being and engaging
with media means being linked to people and places both within and
beyond traditional political borders. As a result, media shapes and facil-
itates the formation of new geographies and other space-constituting
and place-based configurations. The Geographies of Media series serves
as a forum to engage with the shape-shifting dimensions of mediascapes
from an array of methodological, critical and analytical perspectives.
The series welcomes proposals for monographs and edited volumes
exploring the cultural and social impact of multi-modal media on the
creation of space, place, and everyday life.
Platform Urbanism
Negotiating Platform Ecosystems
in Connected Cities
Sarah Barns
Sitelines Media
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Geographies of Media
ISBN 978-981-32-9724-1 ISBN 978-981-32-9725-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9725-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore
Pte Ltd. 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte
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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
Series Editors’ Preface
v
vi Series Editors’ Preface
As Barns states: ‘Quaint distinctions between the “built” and the “dig-
ital” are collapsing, just as software makers are literally becoming “city
builders”’.
This last remark points to many of this book’s case studies on how
digital platforms like Facebook, Uber and Airbnb impact urban life
and its social and physical structures. This is not only because of how
people organise themselves and how they construct their own imagined
geographies, but also because of the ‘constant discursive struggles over
[the urban terrain’s] representation’, as Chapter 3 asserts. The impact
of corporations to shape the city to its needs using smart technology,
is contrasted by the bottom-up potential of smart handheld devices,
potentially enabling novel governance structures and a new maturity of
urban dwellers.
It is not the mixture of both corporate and bottom-up approaches
that make platforms so intriguing for urban development, but the
potential of a third outlet, that is often being overlooked (or deliberately
neglected). There are not only two elements, like buy and sell, or search
and advertise, that constitute digital (social or economic) exchange. The
platform itself consists of a much higher potential, and it is spreading
into our real-life environment. Yet as much as platforms are increasingly
intrinsic to urban living, one must recognise a multiplicity of urban
experience and sense-making that exceed or resist the codification of our
lives that question digital and technological governance of platforms.
Thus, we are very excited to present you with Sarah Barns’ Platform
Urbanism as the third instalment of the Geographies of Media series.
Platform intermediation, data sovereignty and cooperative business
models are trajectories already taken but still in need of further expan-
sion. The future appears simultaneously knowable and unpredictable,
volatile and impermeable. So, let’s now leave the station and jump on
the Platform Urbanism train. Or, as Bruce Springsteen puts it: ‘The light
from the oncoming train focuses the mind’.
Torsten Wissmann
Joseph Palis
viii Series Editors’ Preface
References
Boos, T. (2017). Inhabiting Cyberspace and Emerging Cyberplaces: The Case of
Siena, Italy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge.
Peters, K. (2018). Sound, Space and Society: Rebel Radio. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Acknowledgements
ix
x Acknowledgements
3 City Reverberations 53
Introduction 53
Smart Citizens vs Smart Cities 57
Imagining the Street as a Platform 63
xi
xii Contents
Conclusion 69
References 69
4 A Momentary Interlude 75
A Personal Encounter 75
Reference 77
Bibliography 203
Index 227
List of Figures
xv
List of Tables
xvii
1
Introduction: A Scene on a Train
friend’s holiday snaps are marginally more interesting than this, so you
cast your eyes back down to the feed, and roll on.
It’s a scene that could take place across any number of cities across the
world. Though this experience has its own place-based peculiarities—the
language of the station announcers, the particular advertisements pasted
throughout the carriage, the social etiquette of passengers—this scene is
also very much a global phenomenon, one we may experience wherever
we find large volumes of commuters with access to smartphones. The
smartphone interface—whether that of Apple’s iPhone, or the Android
operating system—constructs a certain uniformity of experience across
time, place, culture and disposition. Head oriented towards screen in palm
as a mode of contemporary urban encounter; swipe for idle people-watching;
tap for active engagement.
Commuting itself is a daily ritual for many. As the distances between
jobs and home have increased across many of the world’s major cities—a
function of the seemingly unstoppable expansion of the world’s urban
footprint—time spent commuting has, for many, continued to grow. For
those who find themselves in train carriages going to and fro to work, the
smartphone is likely to be a vital part of the trip. This daily commute, so
often thought of as liminal, interstitial or even ‘wasted’ time (Bisell 2018),
is a time many now spend completely absorbed in their smartphones.
Confined within the space of a speeding train carriage, eyes cast downwards
at our glowing rectangle screens, as digitally-augmented commuters we
are very much ‘alone together’, to use Sherry Turkle’s (2011) phrase. We
expect little interaction with our fellow commuters who, despite being
crammed perhaps a little too close to our physical selves, are orienting their
communicative selves somewhere entirely else. Somewhere quite different
indeed to the train carriage you find yourself inhabiting for a duration of
time, as it whisks you along the railway tracks, freed from the gridlock of
traffic, and the pedantry of pedestrian space-time.
Familiar and pervasive as it is, this scene can also be seen as a rather
peculiar way for large groups of people to actually interact in one place.
As Turkle has put it, our digital devices help put ‘real on the run’ (2011),
meaning that they introduce substitutes for connecting with each other
face to face. Whether or not we agree that ‘face to face’ communication
is in fact more ‘real’, or less artificially-constructed, than digital modes
1 Introduction: A Scene on a Train 3
one of the notorious ‘red rattlers’—old trains that lack air conditioning
or heating, and somehow manage to feel too warm even in the cooler
months. It’s this very air that also happens to be a medium for the wireless
transmission of all the messages and photos and emails and songs you
and your fellow commuters are busily sending and receiving. Building on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century innovations in radio-telegraphy and
radio-communications, today’s smartphones use parts of the electromag-
netic spectrum devoted to radio frequencies, which make use of frequency
1 Introduction: A Scene on a Train 5
bands between 3 kHz and 300 GHz. These are otherwise known as ‘radio
waves’. The discovery of these radio waves, by pioneering physicists and
engineers of the nineteenth century, happened to utterly transform the
way we communicated in the twentieth century.1
Through wireless communications, our capacity to communicate
instantly with those who were far removed from us physically would
rapidly advance. As has been widely observed, it was as though human
society had conquered or annihilated distances, not just by speeding up
transport modes, but also, increasingly, by dematerialising our commu-
nicative spaces as well. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, responding to
the significance of radio as a new medium of communication, described
the modern spatiality of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Dasein) as being pushed
‘towards the conquest of remoteness’ (Heidegger 1962). Such technology
shifts would come to embody a new cultural era, one accompanied by
new intellectual frameworks through which to understand an increasingly
globally-connected, yet radically-deterritorialised world. We emerged into
‘the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side,
of the dispersed’ (Foucault 1984)—a way of being that in turn became
synonymous with the cultural logics of late capitalism (Jameson 1984;
Castells 2000; Lunt and Livingstone 2011).
When we look back in time, to when today’s old technologies were new
(Marvin 1988), we notice how often emergent technologies are initially
experienced as a shock or displacement to the senses. Watching people
immersed in the brand new medium of radio, German sociologist Siegfried
Kracauer bemoaned the way radio ‘vaporises beings’. ‘Silent and lifeless,
people sit side by side as if their souls were wandering far away’, attuned
to the playground of broadcast noises from afar (Kracauer 1995). Being
‘alone together’, then, is not exactly a new phenomenon. As Scott McQuire
1 While Guglielmo Marconi is often attributed as the inventor of radio technology, there are many
other inventors, physicists and engineers who contributed to our understanding of radio communi-
cations. Nikolai Tesla is one inventor whose neglected role in its development is now being corrected.
Another is Sir Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand born physicist who built a magnetic detector
capable of transmitting wireless signals while a student at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
in 1896. For more on the history of radio, see Gardiol, F. (2011). About the beginnings of wireless.
International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technologies, 1–8, Marvin, C. (1988a). When Old
Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New
York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, and Sterne J. (2004). The Audible Past: The Cultural
Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham and London, Duke University Press. as examples.
Another random document with
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corrisponde al giro esterno della seconda cavea, donde si saliva alle
logge superiori di archi laterizii, destinate per le donne e per la plebe.
Da questo deambulacrum, non è superfluo al visitatore delle rovine
di Pompei il sapere come si goda del più delizioso orizzonte, poichè
rimpetto si abbia il Vesuvio, a settentrione i monti Irpini, ad oriente i
monti Lattarj, sulla china dei quali posa Sorrento, e a mezzodì Napoli
e le sue isole avvolte come da una rosea nebbia trasparente.
Forse a diminuzione di spesa, e forse anche a renderlo proprio agli
spettacoli di naumachia, se si avessero voluti offrire, ma che però il
fatto d’essere città marittima esclude che vi si avessero a dare,
perchè certo sarebbero riusciti inferiori ad ogni aspettazione ed a
quelli che offerir si potevano sul mare stesso, l’edificio era stato
costruito in una specie di bacino, scavato in parte artificialmente, per
modo che l’arena si trovasse tanto al di sotto del livello del suolo per
quanto le mura si elevavano al disopra.
Vien misurato il più gran diametro dell’anfiteatro di 130 metri, il più
piccolo di 102. La direzione dell’ovale è da N. a S.: alle sue estremità
si trovano i due principali ingressi, i quali mettono all’arena di forma
elittica.
Appunto per la suindicata ragione, che l’arena era incavata nella
terra, l’ingresso settentrionale che riesce a quella e che forma un
breve porticato a vôlta, ha il pavimento lastricato di pietra vulcanica
in declivio, ed ha nei lati l’incanalatura per ricevere le acque.
Due grandi nicchie sono a destra ed a sinistra di tale ingresso, le
quali dovevano contenere le statue di due benemeriti cittadini, e di
chi fossero ce lo rivelano le opportune iscrizioni che sotto di esse si
leggono.
Quella a destra è così concepita:
C . CVSPIVS C . F . PANSA PONTIF
D . VIR . I . D . [120]
Importa che io qui traduca una nota che Bréton appone a queste
interessanti iscrizioni.
«Queste iscrizioni, scrive egli, presentano un enigma assai difficile a
sciogliere. Che vogliono esse dire queste parole PRO LVD, pro
ludis? Si è creduto dover tradurre per i giuochi, e scorgere quindi
nell’iscrizione la menzione dei giuochi che venivan celebrati
nell’anfiteatro [124] da certi magistrati. Questa interpretazione
sarebbe stata accettabile, se nella terza iscrizione non si trovassero
le parole PRO LVD . LVM . che il P. Garrucci legge pro ludorum
luminatione, per l’illuminazione dei giuochi, e Mommsen pro ludorum
luminibus; per i lumi dei giuochi. Questa spiegazione non essendoci
sembrata in tutto soddisfacente noi abbiamo consultato uno de’
nostri dotti colleghi, il signor Léon Rénier, noto per gli studj speciali
che ha fatti dell’epigrafia antica. I nostri lettori saran lieti di trovar qui
le sue risposte, delle quali abbiamo creduto adottare le conclusioni
così ben motivate.
«L’interpretazione del P. Garrucci, e quella di Mommsen, dice Léon
Rénier, proverebbero, se si fosse costretti d’attenervisi, che si davan
dei giuochi con illuminazione nell’anfiteatro di Pompei, ciò che non
mi pare da ammettere. Ecco come io interpreto il passo
dell’iscrizione: Marcus CANTRIVS, Marci Filius MARCELLVS duum
VIR PRO LVDis LVMinatione, CVNEOS III Faciendos Curavit EX
Decreto Decurionum. PRO LUDis, LVMinatione, cioè in luogo dei
giuochi e dell’illuminazione, ch’ei doveva dare nell’occasione della
sua elezione alle funzioni di Duumviro. L’elissi della congiunzione et
non ha nulla che debba sorprenderci: era essa di regola nello stile
epigrafico. (Ved. Morcelli, De Stylo inscr. p. 4486 ed. Rom.) Gli onori
municipali si pagavano ordinariamente con giuochi, spettacoli,
distribuzioni di sparsioni, ecc.: spese improduttive che si
scontravano talvolta come qui, con altre spese equivalenti il cui
effetto era più durevole. In una iscrizione di Djemilah (l’antica
Colonia Cuiculitanorum), che io ho pubblicato in una memoria che fa
parte dell’ultimo volume della Società degli Antiquari di Francia, si
vede un magistrato di questa città erigere una basilica, in luogo
d’uno spettacolo di gladiatori ch’ei doveva dare. Si potrebbero citare
molti esempi analoghi.
«Le interpretazioni del P. Garrucci e di Mommsen sono affatto
congetturali; la mia si appoggia sopra esempj che mi sembrano
concludenti. Il primo ne è fornito da un’iscrizione di Roma edita dal
Fabretti Inscript. Domestic. p. 243 n. 556, e da Orelli p. 3324, la
quale termina così: POPVLO VISCERATIonem GLADIATORES
DEDIT LVMINAtionem LVDOS Junoni Sospitæ Magnæ Reginæ
SOLIS FECIT.
«Il secondo si trova in un’iscrizione della raccolta di Muratori pl. 652.
n. 6, nella quale si legge:
..... VS . SPORTVLAS ITEM FIERI ET
..... PVERIS NVCES SPARGI DIE Suprascripto ET
LVMINATIONE
. . . . similisque triumpho
Præda caballorum Prætor sedet [133],
uscendo dalla porta trionfale del circo fra le ovazioni frenetiche del
popolo, colle palme raccolte e della corona di lentischio recinta la
fronte, spesso assisero conviva alla mensa imperiale.
Passo rapido ora da questo subbietto, perocchè fosse, a mio
sentimento, mal propria l’arena dell’anfiteatro pompeiano a siffatto
genere di ludi, e vengo invece più distesamente a dire de’ gladiatorj,
che tutto attesta essere stati assai frequenti in Pompei.
Ed è a questo punto ch’io pongo dapprima la descrizione del Ludo
Gladiatorio che esisteva e che venne discoperta dagli scavi in
Pompei.
Ma non pensi il lettore ch’io m’intenda parlare di quella taberna, che
da parecchie Guide vien detta la Scola dei Gladiatori, la quale fu
scoperta il 12 aprile 1847 ed a cui valse un tale titolo unicamente
perchè nell’esterno di essa si trovò un’insegna dipinta che
rappresentava un combattimento di gladiatori. L’angustia di questa
esclude assolutamente ch’essa potesse servire allo scopo al quale si
vorrebbe destinata, poichè la scuola de’ gladiatori suppone che
abbia un locale atto all’esercizio della scherma e capace di
contenere, oltre i duellanti, anche il lanista, o loro maestro. Ora una
tale taberna non era atta a tanto. Più probabile è invece ch’essa
appartenesse a qualche theatropola, o impresario di pubblici
spettacoli, il quale vi tenesse ricapito per la vendita delle tessere
teatrali, o per l’allestimento dei ludi o per l’ingaggio dei gladiatori.
Tale insegna, comunque difesa da un piccolo tetto, è pressochè tutta
omai cancellata: sotto di essa vi si lesse in addietro la seguente
iscrizione:
ABIAT (HABEAT) VENERE (VENEREM) POMPEIIANA (M) IRADAM (IRATA)
QVI HOC LAESERIT [134].