Article in the Economist, Home Truth About Telecoms. Technology and Society: Anthropologists investigate the use of communications technology and reach some surprising conclusions:

Of course, improvements to mobile networks and the spread of third-generation (3G) and Wi-Fi networks mean that you no longer need to be at your desk to get things done. But Ms Broadbent found that there is not, in fact, much appetite for working while on the move. Indeed, she calls this “the hypermobility myth”. After studying workers who spend more than half their time out of the office—salesmen, consultants, pilots, journalists and photographers—she found that they generally stick to communications while on the move, gathering information that they then work on when they get back to their desks. Hotel rooms and airports are, she says, “not seen as an appropriate environment for substantive work” and are mainly used for e-mail.

Business Week, Sept. 10, 2007

Digitization? The entire network runs on software known as Jovial, so old there are only 6 programmers in the country who know how to write it. And incredible as it seems, family minivans with NavStar have more sophisticated location guidance than some aircraft.

Via archilab.org:

La mobilité est aussi celle des habitants. Dans les projets d’Architecture-Principe, entre 1963 et 1968, le sol se soulève, et le plan oblique génère une architecture du déplacement. Le principe majeur de la fonction oblique est celui de la “circulation habitable”, rendue possible à travers les plans inclinés, le sol artificiel et les systèmes de rampes. Parent et Virilio parlent alors de “dérivation” dans les villes obliques. La fracture du plan détermine la fonction oblique. Dès 1966, année de la construction de l’église Ste Bernadette du Banlay à Nevers, - monolithe fracturé en béton brut -, l’architecture se transforme en “plaques topotoniques” mouvantes dont l’inclinaison incorpore le déplacement physique de l’habitant. Cette dimension gravitationnelle de l’espace a, encore aujourd’hui, des répercussions dans le développement récent des architectures cognitives, espaces artificiels animés qui interagissent avec l’habitant ou leur environnement (Nox, Oosterhuis, etc). Avant sa rencontre avec Paul Virilio, Claude Parent avait déjà exploré la fracture du plan, l’instabilité à travers le basculement de cubes ainsi qu’à travers ses premiers dessins de Turbosites et de Villes-cônes. Paul Virilio avait, quant à lui, déjà mené des recherches sur les bunkers de l’Atlantique. Tous deux fondèrent ainsi le groupe et la revue “Architecture-Principe” qui développa la fonction oblique à partir de la “topologie des surfaces orientées”. La plupart des dessins et maquettes des projets expérimentaux d’Architecture-Principe seront exposés.

Hotel Fox website:

For the launch of the new Volkswagen Fox 21 international artists from the fields of graphic design, urban art and illustration turned Hotel Fox in central Copenhagen, into the world’s most exciting and creative lifestyle hotel.

Ulrich sent me the paper he wrote with C. M. about Hotel Fox: Creative industries as a cultural resource : how cities can prepare the ground for future leisure offers and demands. Towards a theoretical framework for futurizing the leisure sector. The authors write:

The basic idea behind Project Fox was that Volkswagen didn´t want to organise yet another launch event only geared towards trade journalists but rather try to introduce their new product within the lifeworlds of what was to be called young urban travelers. In taking up this metaphor around urban mobility, the winning event design by eventlabs in Hamburg extended the notion of car travel into tourism and suggested a more long-term transformation of urban space by staging a variety of experiences.

Find the conference website! HotelFox .pdf

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York, Modern Library: 1993), page 65 of this re-edition:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of side-walk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance_not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in anyone place is always replete with new improvisations.

Isn’t Jane Jacobs’ writing succulent?

Now that the streets are stripped of live eyes, CCTVs take over, artificially attempting to maintain ’safety’ without the freedom of the city. Surveillance. Needless to say that these ‘ubiquitous’ artificial eyes also augment the need for ‘storage’ spaces.

Enjoy the text and have a look at the website: Paris: Ville Invisible

Paris: Invisible City
Bruno Latour & Emilie Hermant

Translated from the French by Liz Carey-Libbrecht
Corrected February 2006 by Valérie Pihet

We often tend to contrast real and virtual, hard urban reality and electronic utopias. This work tries to show that real cities have a lot in common with Italo Calvino’s “invisible cities”. As congested, saturated and asphyxiated as it may be, in the invisible city of Paris we may learn to breathe more easily, provided we alter our social theory.

Read more about the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour.

…on neo-nomads’ whereabouts:

Rhizome

Turbulence

The Pondering Primate 

Amir Rozenberg, from Connexto has been a key actor in the process of the project DiMo. Thank you Amir for your work-boosting post!

Amir is the Director of Product Management at Nextcode Corporation. Nextcode is providing ConnexTo, the mobile code scanning solution.

Remember project DiMo? Yesterday evening I was reading this article of the NYTimes: New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone… by Louise Story | April 1, 2007. Here are some excerpts:

[…] American universities and technology companies have been experimenting with the codes in their labs for several years. Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers’ licenses and on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.

[…] In the United States last fall, the Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies placed the codes on concert posters.

[…] Executives at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint declined to say whether they were in discussions with the companies that make the code reading technology. Bar code companies said the carriers stood to benefit from the codes because they might encourage consumers to add Internet service plans to their accounts and spend more time on their phones.”

[…] The consumer needs a reason to do it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode, a bar code company. “They don’t just wake up and say, ‘Hey, let’s go scan some bar codes.’”

If you are wondering which are these universities… well yes, there is us! Find more on the class project: DiMo blog.

A very interesting 52 minutes 1972 BBC documentary (directed by Julian Cooper) staring Reyner Banham (1922-1988), architecture theorist, member of the Independent Group, who also had contacts with Archigram.

We learn in Encyclopedia Britannica…

[…] The automobile so dominates life in this uniquely mobile community [Los Angeles] that Reyner Banham, an English observer who took his cue from scholars who study Italian in order to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so he could “read Los Angeles in the original.”

Reyner Banham is according to Nigel Whiteley the Historian of the Immediate Future!

To read as well: The kinetic icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as mobile metropolis.