A few of us working at the intersection of data, civicmedia and citizenship are taking a look at this article by AbdouMaliq Simone. Some rambling comments follow:
First, just a short point about style: I’m delighted to see Simone’s unapologetic use of rich descriptions of Jo’berg’s streets. They are in striking contrast to what I see to be the standard ethnographic account in HCI papers. What I find tedious is the usual preamble in HCI works—explaining method—and then the use of participants’ quotes as a kind of ‘proof’ of particular points. Also, both point to a curious idea of what it means to demonstrate evidence or proof. Simone bothers with none of this. He gets straight to the stories, to the rich descriptions of inner city Jo’berg and its underbelly.
On to the paper’s content, I like what I take to be its overriding argument, that the infrastructures of accountability in ordinary civil society sit uneasily against what goes on on the streets of Jo’berg. In fact, life in this inner city opens up a manifestly different set of (infra)structures and practices that force a reimagining of how cities might be organised. Thus I take Simone to be arguing that the conventional structures for organising society are alienating when projected into environments like Jo’berg:
“Efforts on the part of both the urban government and civil society to reconstitute viable territories of belonging and accountability through an array of decentralisation and popular participation measures may have the converse effect of highlighting the failures of groups and individuals to secure themselves within any durable context.” P. 419
Reading Simone’s descriptions of Jo’berg street-life, I really want to be convinced of this argument. However, I have to say his accounts don’t fully satisfy me. I may simply be too conservative to reconcile Simone’s argument and his details of city life, but I’m troubled because they read to some extent as a rationale for lawlessness and social transgressions. They present a case where opportunity, cultural bricolage, geographic fluidity and ‘adaptable collaboration’ are placed above civic responsibility and, well, good citizenship. I imagine Simone’s response to this to be not a defence of the criminality, but to claim the example as an indication of how other non-conventional forces can be at play, working beyond the establishment. However, in this case difference and vice (as he articulates so well) are so bound up with one another. It is precisely because they are nefarious that the inner-city practices must operate at the fringes of visibility, cemented infrastructure, etc.
Something else I struggle with are the details of Simone’s points. The paper skips across so many lovely little themes and points yet, to me, these don’t always join up easily or help to build a coherency of argument. Many could probably be papers in themselves. For example the points around expansion, provisionality, and preparedness are all compelling, but they seem to be just left and not brought back to the wider argument of infrastructures (at least not in any clear or constructive way).
Having listed a couple of what I see to be the paper’s weaknesses, I do find inspiration in it. What I find productive is the way Simone points to infrastructures (tied to “conventional imaginaries”) as socially organising. They both enforce social or civic order and expect it to be visibly reproduced.
“Not only does the city become the objective of a plurality of coding systems, it is meant to manifest itself more clearly as a system of codes. In other words, it is to be an arena where spaces, activities, populations, flows, and structures are made visible, or more precisely, recognisable and familiar.
Once this enhanced visibility is accomplished, urban spaces and activities are more capable of being retrieved and compared for analysis” P. 426
So the codes of (infra)structures are a mechanism of control and visible, public accountability:
“Urban politics then operates not as a locus of mediation and dialogue among differing experiences, claims, and perspectives but as a proliferation of technical standards by which every citizen’s capacities are to be compared and judged.” P. 420
Vis-á-vis data (and the research a few of us are doing at the intersection of data, citizenship, community, civic society, etc.), we see a similar case in which homogeneity is needed. In Simone’s argument about infrastructure, we find the justification for why common (technical) standards are built into infrastructures, they help compare and judge (in visibly accountable ways). Just like the contemporary built environment that is built on standards and, at the same time, resembles everywhere and nowhere (see Iain Sinclair, Ghost Milk), data enforces regimes of homogeneity to get the data to work at any/every degree of scale. The popular imaginaries surrounding (big) data are all about this idea of comparison and judgement.
This itself isn’t an especially sophisticated point, but what Simone does with it is show how Jo’berg’s inner-city life offers another possibility of “complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices” that are far more provisional, fragmented and, to be be blunt, useful for those on the streets. I take Simone’s argument then to be one of seeing infrastructure (in its richness and variety, rather than homogeneity) as an ingredient for, as he puts it, “expanding spaces of economic and cultural operation” P. 407. That is, we might see data (and its associated infrastructures) not as a singular rationalising force for reproducing social/civic norms and practices, but instead as a opportunity to feed into progressive movements that allow for “alternative regimes of property and contract to coexist experimentally within the same economy.” (Roberto Unger, 2009). Ultimately, data and its associated infrastructures might be refigured to extend beyond the flattening of social/civic life, and be given over to enabling a ‘fuller life’ for citizens—as Unger phrases it, “a larger life, a life of greater intensity, of greater scope, and of greater capability.”
Thanks for posting this, Alex! I found myself thinking a lot about an oft-overlooked moment in Jacob’s DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES where she talks about the purpose of neighborhoods. For Jacobs, “the conception of neighborhood in cities is meaningless – so long as we think of neighborhoods as being self-contained units to any significant degree,” (p. 117), where the exceptions for thinking of neighborhoods as useful are first, in the capacity for drawing assistance from larger bodies of government and second, “to weave webs of public surveillance and thus to protect strangers as well as themselves; to grow networks of small-scale, everyday public life and thus of trust and social control; and to help assimilate children into reasonably responsible and tolerant city life” (p. 119). For Jacobs, neighborhoods offer a means of drawing governmental support, as well as establishing mechanisms of collective social control. Spatial boundaries thus provide a way of articulating social boundaries, where residents can make determinations of inclusion based on adherence to spatial norms.
{oops! This belongs with the earlier quote, wordpress is wonky sometimes} In reading the Simone piece, I was connecting the descriptions of surveillance and monitoring of behaviors to Jacobs’ ideas of the role of neighborhoods in maintaining behavior. Thus, people aren’t just infrastructure of relationships, they also form infrastructures of surveillance.
Haha, very good. I have Jaobs’ book sat on my desk — but alas, I haven’t read it yet. I like the unfolding tensions behind local constructions of infrastructure and top-down ones. They help to see, and think through, how cities and enacted in multiple ways. And, yes, surveillance seems very much to be apart of this. Have you seen the film Red Road? It’s a wonderful (if dark) examination of the multiple sides of surveillance.
Thanks for initiating this discussion Alex. It was a really thought-provoking read and a offers a very different take on what city and street life can be. A few things stood out for me, in relation to the our own project.
— The idea that organisations and territories appear bounded, but that this boundedness is a ‘performance’ rather than ‘a description of actual operations’ (p. 422). This boundedness is made visible in Simone’s account of Jo’berg in particular ways — nationality being a prominent factor — but I think this statement has much broader relevance. It’s always going to be the case that territories overlap and that boundaries between them will be fluid, being mitigated by particular interpersonal relationships. There is a sense that, in our project, different organisations and territories are broadly recognised (indeed, some are explicitly defined), and that the two overlap. I wonder to what extent these categories are performed and how, and to what extent they can be seen as a description of operations, and what these operations are. I wonder too, if and how this could be represented as data.
— Relating to this, I was struck by the idea that individuals in Jo’berg are ‘in some way a competitor .. based on self-interest, self-protection, and camaraderie, not on a long-term investment in the cultivation of a place of operation’ (p. 423). I find it interesting that camaraderie is in the middle of this sentence, as though this is a way of keeping things running smoothly without actually making any real investment. Camaraderie here seems superficial, and perhaps this is magnified by the fact that even where good relationships form, the people that they are formed with aren’t likely to stay in the area. Themes of community and transience are both applicable in our project, as is the notion of self-interest. It’s interesting to consider how these intersect — what do transient populations as opposed to those firmly rooted in the street hope to get from the project? How is this manifested in relation to data?
— As a final point, the tension between making things visible as a way of supporting administration and the use of resources is interesting. I think we’ve seen this in some of our meetings; it’s been expressed that better knowledge of the resources available in the street would support flexible and shared use of them. We haven’t really considered what the complexities of doing so are, and I think this could feed nicely into some of our broader discussions about accountability and openness.
PS The above is meant to be bullet points! Sorry about the formatting.
Hard to know who’s posted what here, but a few responses/reflections.
I like the idea that organisations and territories are performed categories, and that these may in some way describe or enact operations. This muddies the distinctions between things, processes and practices. I’d like to find some compelling examples where the data doesn’t try to tidy up the subject categories and leaves them messy and, at times, in tension. It’s a challenge to think about how this might be represented intelligibly, but it does seem a challenge worth pursuing. The alternative are data representations that persist in telling us what we already know — and we all know there are plenty of those around.
The transience of the street is something we’ve discussed but never quite got a handle on. My hope is it might develop in some of the historical archive work and how this sits against contemporary and everyday narratives produced either by the residents or data we collect. Siân’s been giving some thought to the temporal aspects of the project and I think this is going to be something to work up.
The issues raised about how the municipal entities and the very different (codified) understandings they have of Jo’berg’s streets to what appears to be happening on the ground definitely has some relevance to the Tenison Road project. Of course the scale and degree of vice/crime is of an entirely different order, but nevertheless, I think not surprisingly there are multiple views of the street being enacted by the residents, developers, local council, etc. Again, we have definitely touched on these things and they will, I’m sure, come up again. Our concern should I guess be for how to surface them in the data work and allow them to be put to productive use.
Sorry to be picking this up relatively late. I really enjoyed the ethnographic accounts in this piece, particularly the meandering along Qaurtz street, which led me to see Simon’s presentation as a kind of disciplining in itself of the arguments he attempts to make. I totally agree with Alex’s critique around the multiple articles that could be written about one or more of Simone’s arguments.
Sorry to be picking this up relatively late. I really enjoyed the ethnographic accounts in this piece, particularly the meandering along Qaurtz street, which led me to see Simon’s presentation as a kind of disciplining in itself of the arguments he attempts to make. I totally agree with Alex’s critique around the multiple articles that could be written about one or more of Simone’s arguments.
(Sorry, I somehow pressed submit prematurely!)
Okay, so ‘enter’ equals submit. Learning slowly. 🙂
To continue… I also agree with Alex that Simone’s heavy use of the term ‘collaboration’ to describe residents’ interactions sometimes skirts issues of lawlessness connected to the upheaval and distress in the city, casting violence as sometimes banal and even necessary. But still compelling is how these ‘social collaborations’ could serve as “occasions to be public,” as in the city’s night markets where one can “situate oneself so one can assess what is happening… without constituting a threat” (p.427). In these spaces, residents interpret, fix, and navigate in ways that produce unique forms of social visibility.
But what I found most useful in this piece is Simone’s treatment of “community building,” which he develops as a kind of red herring. Projects initiated by municipals like the Metropolitan Council of Johannesburg can micromanage, becoming “a peripheral disciplinary exercise that distracts residents from developing the real skills that they need to survive” (p.420). This made me wonder how the tension road project (or others in HCI that strive to bring questions of community engagement to tech development) might account for this straining of political and economic relations — or whether they contribute to these ‘tensions’ (hehe) instead.
Tensions, Tenison — it’s so apt! Thanks Daniela. Nice points. I’d love to see how we could keep these kinds of frictions going in the project and at the same time see them as productive.