Augmented reality in urban places: contested content and the duplicity of code

Abstract

With the increasing prevalence of both geographically referenced information and the code through which it is regulated, digital augmentations of place will become increasingly important in everyday, lived geographies. Through two detailed explorations of 'augmented realities', this paper provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmented realities matter, but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in our experiences of augmented places. Because the re-makings of our spatial experiences and interactions are increasingly influenced through the ways in which content and code are fixed, ordered, stabilised and contested, this paper places a focus on how power, as mediated through technological artefacts, code and content, helps to produce place. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors, distributed power and communication power; and two enacted primarily via software, code power and timeless power. The paper concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layerings of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power-laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.

Networks, Interfaces, and Computer-Generated Images: Learning from Digital Visualisations of Urban Redevelopment Projects

“…As this paper's introduction noted, other scholars have already criticised the seductive allure of CGIs as images. Here, this paper takes a different critical tack, and attempts to resist the 'glow of unwork' precisely by reconceptualising the smooth surface of surface of CGIs as a site of (net)work (see also Graham et al, 2013). Rather than take these CGIs at, literally, their face value -that is, rather than focus on their materialisations as images -this paper advocates approaching them as digital files created by, and therefore materialising, a (net)work of interfaces.…”

“…Work has focussed in particular on the ways in which software can control urban infrastructure by gathering data and structuring automated decision-making systems (Crang and Graham, 2007;Thrift and French, 2002); on the way everyday experiences of urban spaces are now often inflected by the 'augmented reality' of mobile social networking and Google Maps (Brighenti, 2010;Gordon, 2010;Graham et al, 2013;de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012); on forms of digital surveillance (Amoore, 2009) and ubiquitous computing (Kinsley, 2010;Kinsley, 2012); and on user-generated 'neo-geography' (Dodge and Kitchin, 2013).…”

Technik, Digitalität und Raum – Konzeptionelle Überlegungen zu den Geographien alltäglichen Technikgebrauchs

“…gesellschaftszentrierte und deutlich kritische Beleuchtung der vielfältigen "Mikrotransformationen" und Machtbeziehungen (s. z.B. Graham et al, 2013) . .…”

Situating Neogeography

“…The 'user-generated' OpenStreetMap platform has far more comprehensive coverage in the Global North than in the Global South; Flickr images form a dense cloud of information over a few parts of the world, while large areas are left devoid of any content; Wikipedia similarly contains signifi cant information inequalities: with a select group of places having been meticulously mapped and described (eg, every French town, village, commune, river, forest, etc has its own article), while other broad regions are barely described at all (eg, there is more Wikipedia content written about Antarctica than all but one country in Africa) (Graham, 2011b). It is not just the quantity of information overlaying a place that is of importance, but also the editorial intent, social and political bias, and various other cultural, linguistic, gendered, and political factors that shape how geography is digitally represented (Graham et al, 2012). These presences and absences matter.…”