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City of Beats: Analysing flânerie as a practice for living the physical space
Silvia Torsi University of Trento, Italy ABSTRACT The flâneur is the urban vagabond in search of experiences and inspirations from serendipitously exploring a city environment. This construct is put beside post-modern stances about the suburban areas built and populated after the Second World War industrialization, along with considerations about ecological psychology, cultural materialism, and sound theory. The main concept is to provide those places with a communication level that would be pleasant to discover while wandering without a destination. Therefore it is desirable to conceive a meta-design tool able to incorporate creativity, ownership, and conviviality. Keywords: Flâneur, flânerie, neightborhoods, third places, post-modernism, physical space, ecological psychology, soundscapes, urban informatics.
INTRODUCTION This chapter intends to refer to the field of urban informatics (Foth, 2011) and lays at the intersection of urbanistics, anthroplogy, and social sciences in order to inform Global Positioning System (GPS) as like as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the design of novel design concepts related to urban strolling. As first is important to question time and space as fixed categories. This is a distortion of the modern way of life, brought by industrialization and rational segmenting of the urban settings according to the work requirements of the large cities.
Figure 1: the post-modern flâneur
Accordingly, here it is explored the concept of flânerie, an important dimension coming from many fields but here focused on research in architecture (e.g. Careri and Colafranceschi, 2002) and ICT, in particular on the area of psychology called Spatial Reasoning (e.g. Montello and Freundschuh, 2005). Time and space provide both structure and contents for living. We perceive time flowing and movement across space as a constituent part of our reasoning (Torsi, 2013). The feeling of time and space dynamically, continuously and cyclically relates to our consciousness, previous knowledge, memory, and delayed intentions (Damasio, 2010). It is the self that negotiates across those dimensions, by weighting, comparing, modeling and expanding them. The anthropological paradigm of Cultural Materialism (e.g. Price, 1982) describes how, when material conditions mutate, they offer novel chances for cognition, culture, and societal challenges. This is the case of ICT, especially when incorporated in Social Media (Sui and Goodchild, 2011). What do those recent material changes bring in terms of ways to experience the environment? It is possible to start from ecologies of artifacts, densities of tools and representations around an individual, or his relationships (e.g. Jung et al. 2008). We can interpret these in terms of ecological niches (Gibson, 2014): self-contained communities, related by artifacts and representations, immersed in a context. How can ICT enhance the experience of place and time? How can the chances for self-disclosure, networking, and collective identities be increased? How can we find novel ways in which to incorporate visual art, narratives, music, or digital media into the culture of a community? How can we relate urban strolling to the identity of a neighborhood? The main topic of this chapter is the artistic, sociological and psychological figure of the flâneur (e.g. Careri and Colafranceschi, 2002, Nuvolati, 2013) the concept of the urban vagabond in search of experiences and inspirations from serendipitously exploring a city environment. As well, the suburban areas built and populated after the Second World War industrialization (Harvey, 1990) are a parallel matter of concern. The main concept is to provide those places with a communication method that would be pleasant to discover while wandering without a destination (Venturi et al., 1972). By means of the theoretical framework built around flânerie as an architectural practice, it is possible to conceive a metadesign tool (Giaccardi, 2003) able to relate creativity, ownership, and conviviality between neighborhoods and the casual walkers (Tuan, 1979). There are several examples in Human-Computer Interaction, Participatory Design and User Experience projects on neighborhoods addressing the design space of those other spaces (Foucalt and Miskowiec, 1986). The starting point here is to describe and analyse flânerie as an aesthetic practice. The design concept is a system able to interact with the soundscape of a physical space by means of geo-tagged sounds posted by the inhabitants. The aim of this chapter is to make an analysis of the features of physical space, especially focusing on places for conviviality, neighborhoods and third places (Oldenburg, 1989). Can we consider neighborhoods as laboratories for growing playful attitudes, artistic practices (e.g. narratives, jokes, rhymes, songs, music, dancing, writing, painting) to be created collectively? How can we provide mixed material/virtual means for building mementos (Petrelli et al., 2008) in the physical spaces? How is it possible to enhance the experience of walking across a neighborhood?
THE FLÂNEUR One of the earliest contributions on flânerie was Walter Benjamin’s work. The 20th century Marxist philosopher theorized the figure of the flâneur, while at the same addressing Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire as describing this way of being in the world as an aesthetic and existential stance. The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled sign of business are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his salon. (Benjamin, 1997 p. 37). Baudelaire explored the dimension of flânerie, fusing the eye of the artist with the exploration of his city in search of adventure, mystery, spell, decay and humanity. With his 1879 Paris Spleen collection of brief proses he traces the coordinates for flânerie in terms of mood, attitude, perceptual cues, adjectives, and colours. Poe’s flânerie is instead more related to the narrative tools of estrangement, physiognomical descriptions and the observation spirit of
the stroller, always focused on what the other walkers overlook and taking casual paths instead of following a direction. The name of the American novelist is related to the concept of flânerie mostly for his 1840 seminal novel The Man in the Crowd in which describes the protagonist’s immersion in a busy neightborhood as he wanders in search of a mysterious man who attracted his attention, and where running after a stranger represents the vain search for one’s self. The rich descriptions of the different weird street characters and the anxious wandering across the street in search of the unknown make this novel a seminal work for the construct of flânerie. Other crucial contributions were then given by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Oswald Splenger, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Elizabeth Wilson, Chris Jenks, Richard Sennett and many others, making the flâneur an angular figure connecting bohemian attitudes with nineteenth century symbolism, and early twentieth century avant-garde with late post modern stances for the interpretation of contemporaneity. More recently Keith Tester and Gianpaolo Nuvolati provided flânerie as a methodological framework and an architectural practice of inquiry for exploring the urban settlements. Flânerie challenges rationality and utopias of the realm of physical spaces, made up by overlayering past events like ancient Roman invasions, or industrial revolution, or mid-twentieth century peripheries for industry workers (Rossi, 1982). In this sense the flâneur takes the streets as an unfolding and open text, made up of infinite possibilities. He looks for the beauty, the ugliness, the poetical, and the unexpected, in order to find inspiration and make a personal sense of the physical spaces. By means of flânerie, he questions the self and experiments his own psychological regression (De Certau, 1984). Therefore time unfolds across spatial patterns. This post-modern, heterotopic (Focault and Miskowiec, 1986) practice is extremely contingent, real and generative. In addition, wandering can be read across semiotics, while approaching flânerie as a text, and the outside as a continuous source of semantic drift (Eco, 1992). The feeling of being-into-the-world, or thrown, in a Heideggerian perspective, provides the exact feelings of bewildering, phenomenological perception and psychological confusion, which in sum bring the flâneur in front of his unconsciousness (Careri and Colafranceschi, 2002). This is one of the consequences of taking flânerie as a methodological tool for triggering creativity and a device to inhabit the neighborhoods of individual and collective experiences. Walking as a practice has also important models in ecological psychology, where J.J. Gibson (2014) describes this activity as a continuous, reverberating, dialectical relationship between the individual, his integument, his feelings and perceptions, in which the human is feedbacking and feedfowarding stimuli from the environment while in the act of moving through the physical space. Anthropology also described walking in its evolutionary dimensions, having its origins from nomadic practices of hunting. Time and space in modern times are questioned categories due to their current disruptive potential of implosion (Harvey, 1990). The flâneur plays and reinvents them, by searching the pleasure of discovering the unknown. As homo ludens, he produces his own time and space by means of his motor and perceptive capabilities within unfolding time-space emergent itineraries. Multiplicity, fragmentation, inconsistencies, voids, contradictions, and negative places are spread throughout casual wandering (Lynch, 1970). In addition, space is very often far from neutral. For example, teenagers and local artists paint the physical spaces they inhabit to mark their ownership of physical space (Ley & Cybriwsky, 1974) and also as a reaction against the culture of work-leisure/shopping spatiotemporal paths and the tourism of idealised cities and standardized itineraries (Burrel, 2012). Graffiti art is one of the earliest forms of reaction that developed against the unconsidered expansion of neighborhoods. The passage of the flâneur is an invisible line among others’ spatiotemporal categories, like routines, appropriate time for actvities, moving between working and family life, and spaces for socialization and community time (De Certau, 1984). The flâneur gathers those invisible lines for a personal collection of spatiotemporal dimensions. His own space and time perception casually relies on whatever comes out from his walks (Careri and Colafranceschi, 2002). His activity is an existential and artistic inquiry on the post-modern deconstruction/construction of space and time across the lives of a city. Heterotopias follow across his path, each taking a place in the flâneur’s postmodern text. This stance is realised by the serendipitous being in search for lively space into which to actualise the dismantlement, the multiplicity, the creative chaos of spaces witnessing at the same time history, personal lives, tastes, and contingencies. Space and time therefore disentangle from external, modern impositions of Fordist modern routines. And the body
becomes the main instrument for measure them, especially with ecological, moving, cyclical and always different processes of knowledge (Ingold, 2009). This vision can be correctly read in terms of urban informatics. ICT and GPS provide non-linear and personalised ways to explore serendipitous itineraries. At present the most expressive means have been regained from the collectivity and move further from the original figures of the artist or of the designer to be available for everybody. Instagram, Pinterest, Blogs, You Tube, 3D printers, or Twitter are examples of democratization of the respective arts: pictures, design, writing, videos, crafting, and journalism (Kietzmann et al., 2012). Providing tools for supporting the experience of flânerie can be a possible way to enrich the expressive means through 2.0 web and GPS. GPS itself transforms the physical space that becomes liquid and interactive, prone to be used for semantic drift, linguistic games, or playful practices, both in a synchronous (e.g. flash mobs, Brejzek, 2010) or asynchronous (e.g. narratives) ways. It is possible to analyse some of the main restrictions industrialization has brought, with the unconsidered building of low income residential areas lacking of the main resources that can bring the feeling of place and community, identity, and ownership. Accordingly, it is reasonable to say that the intents of the Smart Cities programs, or of Transformation Design, can bring their main keywords by picking up the negative consequences of industrialization. Fordism is a cultural paradigm, and consequently provides perceptual arrays, spatiotemporal paths, routines, and definitions of good and bad. ICT and GPS ought to overcome some of the worst distortions of this lifestyle through novel technological means and material conditions. Many post-modern theorists have already analysed the culture of Fordism and its alienating features (e.g. Burrel, 2012), to the extent of stating that we have never been modern, in terms of wellbeing, personal realization, or quality of life. In this theoretical context, it is possible to focus on the properties of ICT and GPS for realising the tenets of post-modern philosophers. The disruptive potential of those authors can have its realization in ICT. Etherogeneities, identities, creativity, gender, freedom, quality time, human-scale cities and neighborhoods are just few buzzwords that can be considered as opportunities to be actualised by ICT for improving wellbeing, conviviality and living. In addition, the specific philosophical figure of the flâneur can be contextualised into a theoretical apparatus coming from post-modern stances and critical design (Dunne and Raby, 2001; Dunne, 2008). In fact, psychogeography (e.g. Wood, 2010) can be set up by means of a heraldic (Venturi et al., 1972), Hertzian space collectively composed of playful selfexpression, humorous voyeurism, and generative music. This would stand for a small opening between public and intimate space, in order to populate the neighborhoods with its inhabitants. It would be easily accessible to the flâneur with just a smartphone, in the form of music loops, audio recordings, poems or narratives as he walks.
BACKGROUND The main source of inspiration for this chapter is the novel City of Glass of Paul Auster, in which the psychological and existential drift of the main character is narrated. He eventually becomes a tramp and walks across the city all day long. He decides to trace images by taking different itineraries. Therefore his paths can identify pictures when seen from a map. The second source of inspiration was the 1996 multimedia product of Peter Gabriel Eve (1996). In particular Eve provided a visual paradigm to create one’s own sound loop by assembling train wagons, each corresponding to a single unitary piece. The train was composed of chosen wagons, thus creating a personalised composition. This resulted in a very simple interaction paradigm for creating music. Below, relevant theoretical work will be introduced and contextualised in terms of relevance for the design concept which this contribution is about. The condition of postmodernity. The analysis of Harvey (1990) focuses of modern acceleration and annihilation of space across time, but also its monetization, the neglecting of physical spaces (e.g. the agglomerates in the periphery), the standardization of daily life routines, the daily spatiotemporal paths between the places for living, working, leisure, tourism. What follows is post-modernism, the admission of the existence of multiple
layers, realms, values, lifestyles. The author leaves the reader at the door of the new millennium. Harvey challenges the idea of a single and objective sense of time and space, in favour of what we can measure across the diversity of human perceptions and conceptions. Space and time can express the role of human practices in their construction. Neither time nor space can be assigned objective meanings independently of material processes. Material practices and processes, in which social life is reproduced, create the awareness of space and time as like the heideggerian fishtank experience, which is diverse across cultures, social layers and geography. The question here is what has changed with ICT and GPS technologies and how the designer can imprint or suggest possible vectors for the technologies to support the time-space dimensions. ICT happily espoused with post modernism in its letting individuals bring power and valuing differences, communication and freedom. Space and place Yi-Fu Tuan focuses on the unitary substance of experience, made up from senses’ perceptions, feelings and thoughts. Experience is an important category for design and it has been bringing operational definitions in HCI (e.g. Wright et al., 2008). Tuan moves across space and time while stating the effectiveness of considering them a joint dimension in humans’ experience. He advocates the need to overcome their division, which is a forced necessity of modern lifestyles. Time and space always occur together, and often it happens that one gives the rhythm for the other. For example walking paths allow the unfolding of time in its linear or recurring dimensions, while landmarks are aggregates of past time (heritage). Places (and in particular third places) allow the stretching of the present time, by means of conviviality, and leisure. The feeling of a place can provide a layering of positive remembering and feelings of identity and belonging. The formation of Genius Loci is a natural consequence from the people creating a nucleus in the spatio-temporal paths. For the development of this, positive and virtuous exchanges need to take place, like trust, dialogues, creativity, playfulness, and reciprocal knowledge. Music takes the specific role of suggesting, directing or subverting those spatio-temporal threads. Relatedness and dialogical reasoning are also implied in the conversation the individuals engage in with the physical places, especially when being guided by diachronic traces of the past passages of people. The Las Vegas strip We wish to take as an important source of creative inspiration the analysis of Venturi et al. (1972) of the Las Vegas strip. Wedding chapels, sauna baths, gasoline stations, casinos, hotels, drugstores and their coloured lightings contribute to the peculiar aesthetic of this place: Miami Moroccan, Arte Moderne Hollywood Orgasm, Organic Behind, Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic, Niemeyer Moorish, Moorish Tudor (Arabian Nights), Bauhaus Hawaiian (Pag.80). The main idea is that a path as a collective creation can grow from bottom up and plurality against the modernist utopia of rational planning for ideal lifestyles; this is what is called heterotopia. The Las Vegas strip provides an aesthetic experience, along with drift and feelings of bewilderment. Heterotopia is an important concept and along with Dadaist compositions remands to the multiplicity rising from human activity, where the beauty is in the casual the superimpositions and the layering of signs. Dadaists and post moderns attack modernism, rationality with their alienating feelings, attitudes and appearance by advocating real life’s lively chaos, having its own aesthetics. Collective and emergent artworks often have those qualities, and can therefore be addressed to those theorizations.
Figure 2: the Las Vegas strip
The image of the city Lynch (1960) provides an important methodological apparatus. It can be a tool for facing the post-modern need for the cities to be redesigned, for recovering them from alienation, compression of time into space, and unconsidered urbanization. His method is analytical, providing tools for making layering maps that make the city emerge into several contiguous dimensions. The image of the city is the result of an intense analysis of the dimensions in the city like: its being situated as a human artefact across time and space, its aesthetic functionalities, its symbolic traits, to be appropriated from the researcher as an active (creative) sense making the (walking) agent, by means of his perception, feelings and past memories. What we look for is not a definitive order, but an open order, able to a continuous further development (…). The environmental image is the result between the observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations. The observer, while adapting and focusing on his intents, selects, organises, and attributes meanings to what he perceives. Therefore the growing image anchors, limits and exalts what is seen, while being challenged by the observer’s perceptual system, which is continuously filtered from his interaction. (p. 28). Basically the method introduced by Lynch provides a set of tools for creating images that can be superimposed for letting patterns emerge and a qualitative study across the inhabitants by presenting them the obtained maps across the dimensions of symbology, function, paths, emotions, personal landmarks, and feelings related to inhabiting that place. This analytical tool can provide the framework for setting up the conditions, for making meta-design in order to allow people to build together a composition that can characterize a neighborhood. Therefore the latter can take the shape of its inhabitants, their moods, their attitude, their stories and their sounds.
THE DIMENSIONS Several dimensions will be considered from different angles, in order to analyse and describe how they have been reified in the past, which new possibilities are arising, and their implications for collective and individual prosperity and wellbeing. They occur together and dialogue with individual consciousness, being felt as a unitary whole. (1) Time, felt with a train of thoughts from the flow of the present (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), the working memory (e.g. Baddeley, 2000), autobiographical memory (e.g. Rubin, 1986) and prospective memory (Brandimonte et al., 2014), but also the selective oblivion of past events (e.g., Augé, 2004; Bannon, 2006). Time perception is highly sensitive to the changes of material conditions, starting from the nineteenth century modernism with its segmenting and measuring lives, to the present with its innovation, in particular with the spreading of smartphones’ use (Torsi, 2013a). In this sense it is possible to say that ICT provides the actualization of a post-modern perception of time. (2) Space. Duourish (2006) demonstrates that the perception of physical space across the story of humankind is related to the technologies available. Rossi (1982), Tuan (1979) and Lynch (1960) provide rich descriptions of how geographical and urban space can be analysed and partitioned across architecture,
history, and culture. The physical space, when providing the needed resources for survival is named by Gibson (2014) ecological niche. (3) The people and the communities who make up the neighborhoods are another dimension. Neighborhoods encompass spatial locations where people live, the places for conviviality (cafes, arcades, squares etc; Oldenburg, 1989). Places are specific for each sub-community; they foster identity, ownership, and relationships. People, communities and sub-communities have increased their role in the individual’s life across social media, locative tools, inexpensive texting, voice messages, and phone calls. This provides novel implications related to Social Capital (Rheingold, 2007). Encountering people, speaking with them, aggregating, relaxing, creating events, gathering people around practices, creating collective media can take novel shapes. (4) Activities are fundamental nodes for the individuals’ cognition and consciousness (e.g. Shön, 1983). Community activities cover a wide range, such as making something collectively, and bringing together people’s different skills, or having a sequence of different people’s actions. There are many theories (which would need to be put here) that explore making sense as as a cognitive/semiotic activity of building novel sense. This brings us closer to what has been called unlimited semiosis (Eco, 1992), and it is one of the most amazing aspects of culture growing inside a community. Usually the results (reifications) of joint activities represent the identity of a community. Art is a primary vehicle for incorporating skills, such as cognitive, social, cultural practices, beliefs, values, identities, issues, tensions, or questions. Some artifacts inhabiting neighborhoods include such things as flyers, posters, graffiti, painted political or humorous phrases, adhesives, or chalks drawings. Novel tools can include QR codes, digital mementos (Petrelli et al., 2008), digital graffiti (McGookin et al., 2012), or location based narratives (e.g. Dow et al., 2005). Here there is a vast design space that is still far from being fully deployed. (5) Emotions, are proven to have their ground in sensuous feelings and the coupling with the environment (Damasio, 2006). These in turn contribute to shape (6) the self, individual consciousness and reflexivity developing and evolution (Damasio, 2010; Shön, 1983). One important value to pursue is the heideggerian dasein, which means being immersed in the world. Dasein makes the point of the fact that we are a part of, and we cannot detach from the environment. We are immersed in what we struggle to interpret. Those dimensions represent the building block of the ergumentation and each of them bring a facet contributing to enrich and complete the model presented. They will be converged across the theories described and will take meaning from the design concepts emerged from this study. Following the physical space and the study of sounds will be described further, baing the core of the design concept here proposed.
PHYSICAL SPACE AND CULTURAL ASSETS In the field of User Experience, Paul Dourish provides some fundamental clues about the physical space that are meant to provide design guidelines from subverting some of the grounded presuppositions of the common conceptions of space and places (Dourish, 2006; Brewer et al., 2008a, 2008b). The persistence of physical spaces is obtained by filling them with meaning through Gestaltic dynamics of creating continuity (Paay & Kjeldskov, 2007). Human perception of space and of ways to make sense of it is given in the same time and produces mental representations, which are embedded in the socio-technical systems (Dourish, 2006). Geographical, mathematical and computational structures come in the second order, as higher psychological processes, prone to model the space in order to master it. The thick layer of sociality involved in the perception of the environment is particularly expressed from the dimension of places, which bring with them emotional, identity, belonging, or sacral feelings (Tuan, 1979). It is not possible to access space as disentangled from ones’ cultural constraints. Here the crucial role of the flâneur is particularly evident. The flâneur, with his unpurposeful, enstranging and seredipitous wandering, creates novel spatiotemporal practices, builds connections, and gathers insights across the different cultural systems he crosses from an external perspective. Novel patterns become evident and perceptual relationships produce new experiences of places and spaces. The Post-Modern stances about negative spaces (Careri and Colafranceschi, 2002), modernist agglomerates of buildings (Harvey, 1990), alienating
spatiotemporal patterns with the need for heterotopic practices, can be considered the precursor of what ICT and GPS technologies that materialised in the past decades. Indeed, Information Sciences, Global Positioning Systems and Web 2.0, provide unprecedented ways to access to, make sense of and interact with spaces, places, and people. This in turn provides the infrastructural layers for realising the tenets of the advocated ontology of the 80s’ post-modernist cultural streams. The layer of information surrounding the inhabited spaces has been recognized early by some research institutes so as to create transdisciplinary departments that are focusing on the potential of this computational space enriching the physical locations. Urban Informatics (Foth et al., 2011) brings together architects, geographers, designers and computer scientists around an umbrella of activities, while starting from sociological and territorial analysis of human behaviors at a large scale, but also measuring the individuals’ shifts in cognitive activities, perception of space, use of infrastructures, along with issues of socialization, networking, communities and relationship. All these approaches embrace physical space in new perspectives; at present geography is having novel definitions in its field of research, means of production, objects of analysis, infrastructural classification and tracing of the connections among the entities taking part in geographical relevant events (Torrens, 2010). There are emerging and consolidated approaches to augment the physical space. Location Based Social Networks have become part of the daily life for many (Kjeldskov et al., 2013), in particular with reference to texts (e.g. Berry and Goodwin, 2013) local clues (e.g. Dearman et al., 2011), virtual graffiti (McGooking et al., 2012), and Web 2.0 social media (e.g. Kietzmann, 2011). GPS-ICT can allow words like psychogeography, cultural capital and production against consumption to be rediscovered under the light of hybrid spaces and augmenting collaborating technologies. The augmented spaces can enhance the mitic dimension in some physical spaces, this had been called from Tuan topophylia (1979), which is the affective relation existing between people and places. Authors like Lyotard, Auge’, De Certau, Harvey, Baudrillard become more actual than ever (Berry and Goodwin, 2013). There is a massive use of QR codes for linking the physical with the digital. Mostly they concern advertising. Using them for user research purposes reveals their capacity to hold the building of narratives, personal contributes, and communication. Linking this tools with web 2.0 settlements provide diachronic communication patterns that enrich the physical spaces and provide immediately a sense of place, community and playful attittude toward discovery (Seeburger, 2014).
THE SOUND ECOLOGY In User Experience there are numerous and robust research experiences into using auditorial displays (e.g McGregor et al., 2002; Garzonis et al., 2009; McGee-Lennon et al., 2011). Less explored is the use of sounds for peripheral awareness purposes (e.g. Bakker et al., 2015). The qualities of acoustical cues are here explored not into instrumental ways, but instead focusing more on the emotions they bring rather than the knowledge they provide. The acoustical dimension is here more focusing on sharing and creativity than the acoustic qualities in their metaphorical functions. For example, Acoustic Ecology is a discipline born in the last century that analyses and deconstructs the soundscapes of physical places (Wrightson, 2000). Its researchers divide the acoustic partition of the environment into biophony (the sounds of the biological sources from microscopic to megafauna), geophony, the sounds of non-living elements of nature, and human noise. There are dozens of insightful observations coming from this discipline, starting from the differences occurring in the soundscapes between day and night, the observation that human language and music grew from the anthropomization of animal species by imitation, or the spatiotemporal harmonies into which the biological sounds tend to create partitions by according each to others (Krause, 2008). Diving into soundscapes theory there is very much to sort out for the project. Interesting is the definition between hi-fi settlements (the natural sounds’ partition) and lo-fi (the composition of sounds brought by industries, cars or appliances). The former provides wellbeing, introspection and positive feelings; the latter restricts the human listening sphere to the extent that one cannot even hear their own voice (Wrightson, 2000). According to the texts of this discipline, industrialization brought an aesthetical shift towards appreciating the puzzling, vibrant and frantic sound
environment of the inner cities, while depreciating neighborhoods and peripheries as boring. For acoustic ecology the opposite is true. Admittedly, the broader partition of peripheries and residential area tend to incentivize introspection, self-knowledge and access to one’s unconscious. Those feelings are discouraged in the Fordist paradigm as bringing anxiety and discomfort (Harvey, 1990). More in depth on sound effects description, samples can be arranged and managed by an expert musician: echo, flânger, phaser, chorus, equalization, filtering, overdrive, pitch shift, time stretching, resonators, synthetiser, modulation, compression and reverse echo are defied and analysed as expressive means1.
THE DESIGN CONCEPT There is a great amount of possible design spaces for using ICT, GPS, web 2.0, mixed reality and embodiment for the category of timespace and in general converging the senses across a unitary experience. Avantgardes like dada, surrealists, lettrists, situationists and land artists can challenge our implicit assumptions (Careri e Colafranceschi, 2002) in order to enhance wandering, serendipity, flânerie, nomadism, drift, exploration of negative spaces and aimed at actualise the artistic vision of the homo ludens, disentangled from the current hedonistic approach of social computing and against the consummation the physical spaces. Instead, the design concept here described would intend to provide an ICT tool for living and experiencing the physical space along with diachronically relating in a dialogue with the people living in it. The design concept here described is based on a GPS infrastructure in which the inhabitants of a neighborhood can append music loops, sounds, rhymes or brief text. In turn this enriched map can represent an accoustically-augmented layer upon the physical space and be experienced from a mobile application that allows listening to those sound by casually walking across the streets of that neighborhood. In this way, casual walkers, flâneurs, strollers, tourists or strangers can cross the streets of a neighborhood and listen to the traces left by the people living there in the shape of a sound composition that is always different according to the path taken. The main design concept is to provide the experience of collaboratively making music that the listener is able to orient by means of his walking behavior. Music loops can be assigned to city blocks or streets, in such a way that the pedestrian can compose the music of their own paths while walking across the city. The system would compute the walking of the user by composing the effects of fade in and fade out among the block/loops. In the same way auditory icons (Enyi, G., 2013), e.g. a few seconds of recording of a vocalist intonation, can signal landmarks (May et al., 2013) or street objects (e.g. manholes, traffic lights, zebra crossing, hydrants, monuments, public buildings). Hence, there would be a nice dialogue between harmony (music loops creating soundscapes) and melody (objects or landmarks marked by auditory icons; Scaringella et al., 2006; Raimbault and Dubois, 2005; Enyi, G., 2013). In addition (fig. 3) another concept is appended to this one, a collar with speakers incorporated in order to listen to the sound loops without being isolated from the real soundscape of the place explored. This would meet safety as well as experience requirements. The main idea is to create the conditions to actualize the constructs of psychogeography, and third places. It is possible to provide similar experiences starting from geo-tagged music loops composed by the local population. As with the stylistic, emerging architectures and signs of Las Vegas which provide continuity to the experience of driving across the strip, in the same way meta-design could provide the creative supports for a location-based composition based on the individuals’ posting of musical loops over the physical space. This hertzian space would be therefore filled with music to be experienced while walking, crossing, or just wandering. An individual can attach musical loops to the side of a block and provide collectively to the soundscape of their neighborhood. The design objective is then to create a relationship between asynchronous and synchronous experiences of sociality, creating the conditions for building a collective memory, set up personalised time space patterns, create the possibility for these to be shared, mediated, and compared across the citizens. Individual biographies take up time through the movements in the environment. The daily time of the 1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_effect
individual unfolds across space. Its representations (codes, signs, spatial discourses, utopian plans, imaginary landscapes, and even material constructs such as symbolic spaces, particularly built environments, paintings, museums, and the like) can provide new meanings, combinations or possibilities for spatial practices. Then, wandering becomes a space of enunciation, the spatialization across time of rebellion, statement, artistic practice, or a, search for identity. Serendipitous walking means to experiment novel productions of space-time experiences. This seed of post-modernism then sparkles across the new conditions brought by social media and provides design guidelines. There can be several approaches to do this, e.g. taking inspiration from nineteenth century avant-gardes. Many creative processes are at stake, like resemantization, deconstucting, collaging, humorous combinations, or self-biography. This ought to be explored under the light of GPS and social media web 2.0 technologies. In this sense, those material conditions reflect an historical shift toward a sort of post-modern-enlightment, providing technologies for the people to pursue their happiness, and at the same time freeing creativity, individuality, multiplicity and connectedness. Also it would be possible to provide probes in terms of self-biography, heritage, culture and identity. People could go outside their houses, meet, and create/share traces, as living appointments, creating music and media and texts, and changing the role of spatiality in their culture: the active production of spaces with special qualities becomes an important stake in spatial competition between localities, cities, regions and nations. In this context we can better situate the striving for cities to forge a distinctive image and to create an atmosphere of place and tradition that will act as a lure to both capital and people of the right sort (Harvey, 1990). There are many connections between space and social identities: they shape superimposed spatial images, and everyone occupies a space of individuation (a body, a room, a home, a community, a nation). As well, the way in which we individuate ourselves shapes our identity. This artistic, intimate, introspective approach is relatively unexplored in GPS-ICT and offers diverse following pathways for crossing this dimension with HCI design approaches. For example criticality (Dunne and Raby, 2001), transformation (Sangiorgi, 2011), presence (Zahorik and Jenison, 1998), felt-life (McCarthy and Wright (2005), embodiment (Dourish, 2006), Urban Informatics (Williams et al., 2009; Foth et al., 2011), affect (Sengers et al., 2008) and enchantment (McCarthy et al., 2006). The objective is to finalise both the chunks of theory crossing into possible directions for GPS web 2.0 design and implementation.
Figure 3: Digital jewellery speakers
USER EXPERIENCE METHODS From a methodological perspective of user studies and user involvement, peripatetic stance can be crossed with co-design in a walker-mode set of participatory practices. Careri et al. (2002) and Nuvolati (2013) describe flânerie as a practice of discovering. These authors underscore the main qualities of wandering across the space as a lively organism, and the related feelings of estrangement, fear, or anxiety. Space and time novel relationships emerge from this practice. Playful attitude, digging for mystery, the seeking of the absurd, the obnoxious, and the ugly reconnect flânerie to its ancestors: the dadaists, the lettrists and the situationists. Basically the flâneur seeks for the physical space to resonate in its own integument in order for dynamics of appropriation to take place through place analyses, spatiotemporal paths, and novel recombinations of the elements in a place. Therefore flânerie in Careri et al. has an important frame into empathic processes and participation. On the other side, Nuvolati offers several analytical tools for modelling the places from the perspective of the wandering dweller, immersed into the physical space with his senses undetached from the object of analysis. Some classical texts of urban planning describe how to perform geographical analysis (Lynch, 1960; Rossi, 1982; Venturi et al. 1972). Those authors provide tools for interpreting the physical space intended as an artefact with specific values, functions and stratifications that are independent from architectural or aesthetic intents. All of them provide cartographic tools for analysing the urban settlements as living organisms gradually built to support the individuals’ lifestyles and routines across generations. More in depth on places are Tuan (1979) and Oldenburg (1988), in which the spatio-temporal paths tend to converge and to provide the inhabitants of positive feelings like ownership, identity, attachment, and belonging. Here the output is a qualitative work based on individuals and collective interviews. Speculatively, homes’ ethnographies, like detailed from Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1997; Baillie and Benyon, 2008 and Blythe at al., 2002 are a crucial node into the design process. The inside part of the physical space in the neighborhoods is the other side. In order to grow positive feelings around places, one of the primary sources can be the domestic environment. There is the need to create bridges between intimacy of a house and the streets where the other people walk through. Therefore activities, sounds, dialogues and noises in the houses can be catalogued and ranked while seeking to gather interesting sounds to loop into the system. In this frame of privacy, intimacy, domestic environment, design probes like in Mattelmaki (2006) and Wallace (2007) take a fundamental role. There is the need to have a deep understanding of the emotional aspects related to family life, sentiments, time spent together, wellbeing, and routines related to family life. In the same way we should be aware of the alternation between the inside and the outside. The main concept of the design phase is to provide heraldic communication bridges between the privacy of the houses and the liberty of the outside streets. In this phase of the project dimensions like aesthetics of interaction, felt-life, hedonics, and poetical intent play their main role for emerging and being incorporated in the prototypes. Probes should provide the openness and the depth of the following concept design phase insights.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The paper is inspired by flânerie as an artistic practice, with an invitation to be lost in the geography of an urban or suburban space. Motivations can be numerous, like the aesthetic appreciation of landmarks, architectural over-layerings from history, psycho-geographical cues, or negative spaces. Flânerie is a possible way for reappropriation of the public spaces, a travel through ones’ own unconsciousness, a practice of sensing by the act of walking, a moving hermeneutic in which the path is the co-created text between the physical space and the individual. This artistic, intimate, introspective approach is relatively unexplored in GPS-ICT and offers diverse following pathways for crossing this dimension with HCI design approaches like criticality (Dunne and Raby, 2001), transformation (Sangiorgi, 2011), presence (Zahorik and Jenison, 1998), traces (Blair, 2009) felt-life (McCarthy and Wright, 2005), embodiment (Dourish, 2004), Urban Informatics (Williams et al., 2009; Foth et al., 2011), affect (Sengers et al., 2008) and enchantment (McCarthy et al., 2006) that can be crossed with the artistic avant gardes of flânerie
already listed. This chapter is about residential neighborhoods where lack of sense of place, genus loci, third places. Many fondamental post-modernist philosophers have largely criticized the Fordist cultural settings, and the way they shape knowledge, routines, and lifestyles. ICT and GPS technologies are at present realising their issues of democratization and multiplicity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research leading to these results has received partially funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n. 600854 Smart Society: hybrid and diversity-aware collective adaptive systems: where people meet machines to build smarter societies http://www.smart-society-project.eu/.
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