Back when I was a fresh and enthusiastic undergrad penned a blog ‘Imagining the City‘. There, I tried to churn some thoughts on the city and the spaces I was surrounded by on a daily basis. It aimed to be a blog about space. Space is definitely a central interest of mine. Anyways. Imagining the City kind of died and as I worked my way up the university ranks I began this blog as a way of taking my lonely PhD path beyond the dusty confines of the (shared) office walls.
I think it has been working. I’m sorry for the lack of posts lately. Often I feel as though I am quite the writer. However, for the last few months – not so much. I’m sure my motivation will come back. After all, there are so many exciting things happening around me. And it’s nice, two years in….to be able to look back and smile that I’ve actually achieved something.
To cut to the chase. Imagining the City is back. I love to take photos….and Flickr just wasn’t cutting it. I needed somewhere I could post my favorites. Somewhere they could sit in a relatively large size….away from cluttered text or sidebars or links or colors. I’ve stocked it up with a few posts to whet your appetite…but please add it to your reader. I’ll still be here, of course….but there is where you can really see who I am. Where I am. Who I wish I could be….and all that stuff.
Sure, here I imagine space in one sense….but there is where my imagination can be brought just slightly more to life.
imaginingthecity.blogspot.com
12 or so days ago, Amber, Lisa and I set out on a Christmas photo project. The task was simple. To each get ourselves a disposable camera and take two photographs per day for the twelve days of Christmas. Other than that, we didn’t really set out any other guidelines. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I have even used a disposable camera ever in my life before! I didn’t even know what to do when it came time to get it developed….take the film out!?…leave it in!?
But in the end, all worked out well. I may have cheated in the project a little, because I actually used two separate cameras…my little Fuji disposable….and my favourite ol’ timer the Olympus Trip 35. I just didn’t cart the disposable camera around with me at all times with discipline like a true photographer would. However, for some reason, I always have my Trip 35 slung over my shoulder.
So, without further ado, I present to you my 12 days of Christmas in 24 photos. Each day is represented by one shot from the disposable, and one shot from the Olympus Trip 35. If you really want, you can see all the other rejects from the disposable camera at the full set on my Flickr page. And gazillions of photos from my Trip 35 here at this set.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Feel free to let me know how I did!….Film is fun…but prohibitively expensive to develop!
Amber’s photos can be found at her website HERE.
I will post a link to Lisa’s ASAP.
Day One: Crowds & Ships in the Storm
Day Two: Two different bikes
Day Three: Sunsets and Pizza
Day Four: Picnicking in the park and Seabirds
Day Five: Native Trees and Architecture
Day Six: We took these at the exact same instant 
(ok, we did two takes…that’s why our cameras are at different angles – and I cropped too, whatcha gonna do!?)
Day Seven: Puppies and Rooftops
Day Eight: Bird’s Eye Lunch and Domestic Goddess Mom
Day Nine: Fisherman and Ducklings
Day Ten: Santa and Nephew Isaiah
Day Eleven: City by both sea and land
Day Twelve: Beach and home again…
The city most worthy of attention is the city that you happen to find yourself in right now…
I was recently given the task of writing just 200 words. That is not very much at all. 200 words is restricting. Yet, 200 words is also refreshing. Below is what happened to come out:
There’s building site just off Ponsonby Rd that I like to ride by whenever I get the chance. Lately there are never any workers there though. Construction must have halted due to a ‘recession’ or something like that. It’s for the best though because no-one really wants a Titanic shopping mall complex just behind their favourite café strip, right? The giant hole in the ground is fascinating; at the bottom of the hole someone has painted the phrase, “I wish this was a swimming pool”. Don’t you wish that was true? I love it when street art is right – when it speaks what you were already thinking anyway.
As I peered deep into the hole and imagined what it was asking me to, I snapped a photo. I was on my own, but the act reminded me that everything about my city was encouraging me to get out and be in it. To wander freely the streets and take in what was going on. Cities never sleep, Auckland is no exception – you just have to look a little harder. It’s a performance, just without the stage. I rode my bicycle much further that night and my city played with me.
as always. more photos can be found at my Flickr.
Hello my dear readers. It’s been a busy past few weeks, but I won’t complain – I know we are all struggling to keep our heads above water in some way or another. I’m just thankful you’ve taken a few seconds to check on what I’m up to.
All I wanted to say is that I have bigger plans for this blog. I want to post more frequently, and more broadly. I want to post photographs and things that inspire me in research and just in everyday life.
Needless to say….my theme sucked. But with that said…I’m not willing to take the plunge to a self-hosted WordPress blog.
So, over the next few days I’m just going to be updating a few dusty corners of this site. Brightening it up. Making it a little more readable, and as a result, perhaps breathing into it a little more life.
I hope you stick with me. And you can expect to be hearing from me soon.
I leave you with a photo I took last week at a wrecking yard on the way home from Ohakune where we were lucky enough to catch the last day snowboarding of the season. It was good!
I’m well into my second day without Twitter. The thing about being cut off by Twitter, is not that I can’t tweet, or message my friends. I can get over that. It’s that I can’t keep up to date with the daily stream of information the people I follow provide me with. These links to blogs and new people of interest are indispensable, and can’t be replicated in an RSS feed etc.
What shall I do when I finally get my feed back? Do I spend days reading back on all that I’ve missed!? Do I just forget it and move on?
I have sent multiple requests to Twitter advising them of my dilemma. I’ve done this through multiple avenues…contact pages…support email addresses etc. So far, no luck at all. Haven’t heard a peep. In a desperate attempt this morning, I started a new temporary twitter account and messaged Biz Stone. Like he will ever hear me though. He receives like 1000 @reply’s per minute.
The problem here is that I was not using a separate account to message potential participants. Instead, in line with my research, studying the technologies and practices that are so finely engrained into our daily lives, I used my personal Twitter account. An account that has been active for my own personal communications since early 2007! Hopefully I hear from Twitter soon. My page is on lockdown!
I wake up this morning to my worst nightmare. My Twitter account has been suspended! WTF?
The long story is that I have been collecting relevant tweets on my RSS reader. When there are a few sitting there, I reply to them and invite the tweeps to participate in my study by chatting to me a bit. Well, after all the travel and chaos over the last few months I didn’t have 30 or 40 tweets to reply to….I had 200+.
There’s two things that could have happened here. One is that Twitter might have automatically suspended my account for too much activity in one day. That would be fair enough. I never send more than a few tweets on any given day (apart from yesterday!). The other is that someone I approached reported me, or marked my tweet as spam. If that’s the case, it’s pretty stink of them…because I’ve been super friendly and made a bunch of friends and followers through my research in these digital worlds.
Anyway. I would have normally tweeted about something like this….but I’ve been cut off! It’s an odd feeling. Look at the numbers of my followers and following. I didn’t realize how much I needed it until it was gone 
I’ve sent the obligatory request to Twitter explaining to them that I think it was in error and I want my account back please, Mr. It’s only midday in LA right now….fingers crossed they can sort me out by this afternoon. Aarg.
This is where all the traditional ethnographers I know with their tape recorders and transcripts are smiling and quietly saying “I told you so”
I think it’s necessary to begin this post on a personal note. In the month since I last wrote, my wife and I have wrapped up life in Toronto and headed back to NZ. It’s hard being back. The purpose of being in Toronto was to be close to public WiFi spots and people who use them regularly. For me to be able to use them regularly. To be near to inspirational and helpful people. A stone’s throw from New York City. Close to universities, conferences, exhibitions and academics I have been privileged enough to meet that, and lets be honest here, would probably have never responded to my email cries for help from oceans away. It’s hard being back because Toronto is a city that its citizens are proud of. I’m proud of Toronto. Determined to bring some of my T.O. back to my NZ.
With that said, NZ rules too. In the photo above, taken just this weekend, my friend Tilly and I are on top of the world. Being back means it is time to take stock of what I’ve achieved over the past year. I’ve seen my methodology change its course one hundred and eighty degrees which is awesome. Over halfway into the three years I’m funded to do this, I can finally see some progression. It has been lonely, most days I just want to quit, but it feels just that little bit more possible right now. Time to account for it all in writing eh!?
The reason I’m here today though, is to begin posting more broadly. While this site must remain central to my PhD work, I feel like it’s time to begin writing a little further afield. After all, I’m not a technologist, nor do I particularly want to be 0ne. I’m a social scientist. A geographer, an urbanist, fascinated by cities, art, architecture, literature, photography, design and exploring the ways that our social lives collide in amongst it all. I want to start thinking more generally about my surroundings. When I was an undergraduate student, I published a blog called ‘Imagining the City‘. Maybe I should rename this site that, or at least give it some kind of a title other than my name…How boring.
Anyways, in line with expanding on what I think about here I present to you below some beautiful imaginations of Auckland in 2100 AD by students of the Media Design School. I came across them via Andy Hudson-Smith’s Digital Urban blog. It’s worth checking out more of them on the school’s Vimeo page, but I’ve embedded my favorites below. I’ve always said that we need to just make the most out of where we are now. I’ve never really spent that much time worrying about tomorrow. If these don’t challenge one to begin thinking about their city in new ways I don’t know what will. It’s the kind of stuff we frequently see applied to Los Angeles or New York City in film, but right here at home. Eerie visions of deserted streets and crumbled, overgrown Sky Towers. Rad. Choice work MDS students! What a great assignment. Especially check out Ravi’s wrecked Harbour Bridge (the third video).
The moment I was first inspired to pursue research on public WiFi came during my undergraduate studies. Writing an essay on geography and technology, my lazy trawling through Google Scholar results led me to a Master’s thesis, Unwiring New York, by Andrea Zoltanetzky (evidently, it’s not clickable as a document anymore. Weird). She wrote of how one could be on Bryant Park’s WiFi network without ever having stepped foot in the park. WiFi didn’t conform to traditional spatial boundaries. This fascinated the budding geographer inside me.
My interest with WiFi and mobile technologies continued into graduate studies. Here I discovered theory and methodological traditions that were beginning to think of city spaces as relational and layered; comprised of bodies and networks and things and flows of information. What’s more, ‘public space’ became a confusing term at best. Especially due to the conditions presented by these wireless technologies. To use a mobile phone or WiFi network, one must me firmly located in physical space, yet, the possibilities of also being connected elsewhere were seemingly infinite.
It was only when I began my doctoral research though, that I began to realize exactly how invisible these spaces were. For a social researcher, an ethnographer, whatever, this presented some unique challenges. My initial plan was basically to hang out in WiFi networks and spot people on laptops. I’d be able to chat to them about their experiences and how their use of the WiFi fitted into their daily life, perhaps, how it might change the way they negotiate the city and it’s public/private spaces. I wanted to gain a more nuanced understanding of personal experiences with technology, rather than conduct a generic survey of 100 or 1000 participants. Since every experience in space was unique, just following the lives of a handful of people would be more than enough.
The thing is, I couldn’t find them! I would sit for hours at coffee shops and public WiFi hotspots and only observe a handful of users. This problem seemed to be shared by others doing social research on WiFi – spots with few or no people to ‘observe’. Access to Wireless Toronto’s network statistics whilst hanging out in WiFi spots revealed to me that the number of connected users according to the statistics never matched up with the number of people I could see out in the park or cafe.
That’s when I realized I was going about things entirely the wrong way. Rather than find people in physical public spaces, I began to find them online. If you read this blog, then you see where I am going. An online ethnography, at least, an ethnography that was initiated by online participant observation quickly revealed the use of free WiFi across the globe in millions more spots than it would have ever been possible for me to sit and physically observe.
People weren’t only using WiFi from their laptops, that’s so 2005!…they were logging on from mobile phones, PDAs and an array of other portable devices! Recent research confirmed that iPhones and mobile devices were popular for logging onto free WiFi networks (even when paid 3G or mobile data was an option)….This was a pleasant surprise given that many of my peers snark at the prospect of free WiFi as they consume gigabyte’s of costly mobile data.
…And finally I could see. Right at this moment I am in Bryant Park. The first time I visited here I scanned the seating arrangements for laptops. When there were few or none, I just accepted it. Now my eyes see differently. I see the people perusing their iPhones and Blackberries, the groups of friends and the old dude reading the newspaper. I see the groundskeepers and the women in the great white tent preparing for Fashion Week. I know now it’s about more than what my eyes can see and these people can’t be discounted as wireless users or not, public or private. Some may not ever go online (or lack the means to do so). Some will sit online for hours. Others might connect just long enough to upload a latest Twitpic. Either way, free/open WiFi is far from everywhere. Even here, in New York, you can’t just log on from every street corner as some writers might lead you to believe. Public space is both as alive as ever, and as confused and contested as ever and understanding it necessitates the researcher’s presence both on and offline.
Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. (is that a saying of some kind?)
