43 cuff Journal of Architectural Education,pp. 43–49 Q 2003 Dana Cuff

DANA CUFF

University of California, Los Angeles

Immanent DomainPervasive Computingand the Public Realm

A wave of emergent digital technology holds vast implications for the public sphere. Indeed,these new forms of mobile and ubiquitous systems, called pervasive computing, challenge some ofour fundamental ideas about subjectivity, visibility, space, and the distinction between public andprivate. Together, these challenges reformulate our conception of the civic realm. From cell phonesto wireless local area networks, smart buildings to embedded vehicular computers, an invisible web ofdigital technology already lies across the visible world creating new space for work, data, advertise-ment, investigation, communication, intimacy, and danger. This generation of computers is so wellintegrated with the environment that it will be dif�cult to distinguish between the two, which repre-sents a profound transformation for everyday life.

Machines that �t the human environmentinstead of forcing humans to enter theirs willmake using a computer as refreshing as takinga walk in the woods.

Mark Weiser

IntroductionIn 1991, the late Mark Weiser wrote a prescientessay for Scienti�c American foretelling the age ofubiquitous computing that he described as “embod-ied virtuality,” in contrast to then cutting edge vir-tual reality. It is this very distinction that motivatesthe present essay. For architects and urbanists, therecan be no more signi�cant revolution in digitaltechnology than the spatial embodiment of com-puters embedded everywhere.

This essay makes the argument that, althoughembodied virtuality has emerged from clear historicprecedent and origins, it raises four distinct implica-tions that hold the potential to change our ideasabout space and spatial practices. First, our environ-ment is enacted and given life, not in the sense thatrobots are actuated, but the entirety of the physicalenvironment is re-created as a potential source ofcoordinated, interdependent actions and reactions.Whether this enacted environment is actual orimagined, as Foucault argued in the case of the

panopticon, it reformulates our notions of powerand, moreover, our relationship to the world aroundus. Second, visibility both literal and metaphorical istransformed. What was solid and opaque becomestransparent, yet what makes the hidden accessible isitself invisible. Third, further erosion of the conceptsof public and private force their reconsideration. Inparticular, questions of surveillance, control, andexhibitionism render the distinction between publicand private anew. Fourth, heightened security andsurveillance possibilities hold the potential torestructure civility, or public life as we know it. InBritain, in the four years following terrorist attacksin London, there was a �fty-fold increase in surveil-lance networks. Post-9/11 America is experiencinga similar expansion, with even more sophisticatedsystems and little debate about the “Orwellianpotential.”1 The consequences for the public sphereare paradoxical given the intrinsic nature of infor-mation technology to bite back, to be turned andused in ways opposed to its original intent. (SeeFigure 1.)

This essay introduces topics for debate, essen-tially asking more questions than it answers. Thefour-part argument for a transformed public sphereraises provocative issues for architects and urban-ists. Just as the panopticon spatially embodied acomplex cultural order in the eighteenth-century

prison, so will embodied virtuality stand as the spa-tial manifestation of the twenty-�rst century. Weare only just beginning to realize the forms thatpervasive computing will assume. Consider Spiel-burg’s 2002 sci-� movie Minority Report, in whichfuturistic biometric scanners can identify shoppersand emit a siren song of personalized consumerpreferences as they pass through the mall. This por-trays a near future, and it is at this generative phaseof development that architects and urbanists mustengage pervasive technologies. Although pervasivecomputing applications within the private sector,like advertising, may have a deep effect on society,I wish to explore ways that the technology isapplied within and by the public sector, in particu-lar, by the state.

Although there are clear technological prece-dents for the emergent, pervasive technologies,they can be distinguished from past developmentsby the fact that this new technology can be botheverywhere and nowhere (unlike the automobilethat is mobile but locatable); that it acts intelli-gently yet fallibly, and its failure is complex (versusthe thermostat, which is responsive but singular andunintelligent); and that intelligent systems operatespatially, yet they are invisible (unlike robots). Forutopians like Weiser, these distinctions suggest thatan environment embedded with intelligent comput-

Immanent Domain:Pervasive Computing and the Public Realm

44

1. Surveillance, voyeurism, and exhibitionism collide.

ing can be nuanced in compelling and even morenatural ways, “as refreshing as taking a walk in thewoods.” Embedded networks, however, are just aslikely to spark dystopic views, as have all precedingtechnological breakthroughs. Now, as pervasivecomputing grows, there is a certain urgency to itscritical review by all those concerned with the publicsphere.

Cyburgs, the EnactedEnvironmentTo be an agent, one must be somewhere.

Robert Sack (1988)

The term public sphere is necessary to a discussionof embedded networks because it implies not onlyphysical space but also the metaphorical space of

public discourse, social norms, interaction, andsocial sentiment. I want to make a strong distinctionbetween what has been called cyberspace fromwhat I will call the cyburg.2 Cyberspace is de�ned ashaving no physicality, no matter, and no Cartesianduality because there is only the mind, and commu-nication is the only transaction. (“Ours is a worldthat is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is notwhere bodies live.”3) If cyberspace is dematerializedspace, the cyburg is spatially embodied computing,or an environment saturated with computing capa-bility. It is the imminent stage of digital media thatplaces computation in all things around us, from ourown skin and bodies (biotechnology and nanotechmedication), to our clothing, to our cars, ourstreets, our homes, and our wildernesses. Thecyburg is the opposite of Christine Boyer’s cybercityand may indeed functionally sidestep all the dysto-pian visions of disembodied, disengaged, sociallyremote cyberlife.

No longer residing in the abstract space of theInternet, digital communicating, processing, andsensing increasingly actuate the world around us.Ironically, as computing becomes more pervasive,we will exist simultaneously within both cyberspaceand cyburg space. This dual existence characterizesa new postmodern space. Our own agency isenhanced by the cyburg, for we can know and actin more powerful ways. Complementing our empow-erment is the newly enacted environment. Not onlydo the walls have ears, but networks of eyes, brains,and data banks to use for purposeful action.Although we are reluctant to attribute agency toobjects in our surroundings, it is a stance that won’tsurvive long. These embedded systems can be saidto have intelligence insofar as they link diversedatabases and change their response according tonew information as well as the consequences oftheir own actions.

Baudrillard, in an essay on consumer society,says that the ecology of the human species has fun-damentally mutated from a life surrounded by otherhuman beings, to a life surrounded by objects:

The concepts of “environment” and “ambi-ance” have undoubtedly become fashionableonly since we have come to live in less proxim-ity to other human beings, less in their pres-ence and discourse, and more under the silentgaze of deceptive and obedient objects whichcontinuously repeat the same discourse, thatof our stupe�ed (medusee) power, of ourpotential af�uence and of our absence fromone another.4

This could fundamentally mutate once again, as ourobjects/environment are no longer silent but active,nor are they obedient but indirectly willful.

New capabilities of pervasive computing sys-tems will expedite the restructuring of everyday lifebecause they permit what we considered the con-text to become a bona �de agent in the publicarena. This is the opposite of early projectionsabout electronic technology. In 1964, MarshallMcLuhan wrote “The telephone: speech withoutwalls. The phonograph: music hall without walls.The photograph: museum without walls. The electriclight: space without walls. The movie, radio and TV:classroom without walls. Man the food-gathererreappears incongruously as information-gatherer. Inthis role, electronic man is no less a nomad than hisPaleolithic ancestors.”5 Instead, speech is issued bythe walls, and the museum’s walls present visitorsits works of art according to their particular viewinghabits, or any of myriad curatorial themes. Streetlights monitor as well as regulate traf�c by assessingvariable fees and suggesting less-crowded routes(see Figure 2); public park sensors scan for unusualbehavior and known criminals, reporting each to theauthorities; smart glass becomes more obscure andre�ective during the hottest part of the day; storescan identify your vehicle and send drive-by mes-sages tailored to your past consumer behavior.These new levels of information, security, conserva-tion, and access are balanced by heightened possi-bilities of intrusion, tracking, classi�cation, andexclusion.

45 cuff

3. Traces of the people on the couch (image 3a) remain in

the thermal image (3b), so that we can now record not

only aspects of the invisible, but the past.

(a)

(b)

2. This image portrays a post-9/11 proposal to reduce

traf�c in lower Manhattan via remote surveillance that

monitors the number of people per car to assess variable

fees. The fewer passengers, the more it costs to drive on

the streets.

Thus, our urban environment can be qualita-tively transformed so that it occupies a new statusand role in everyday life. We can be complicit withthe sidewalks, rejected or embraced by a park, bom-barded in the streets with advertisements.6 MarshallMcLuhan, sometimes called the “oracle of the elec-tronic age,” argued that the content or messagewas not just distorted but de�ned by the media.Had he lived to see pervasive computing, his thesismight have extended to question the boundarybetween space and subject, between the advertise-ment, the object being advertised, and the recep-tion of that ad. Even if we are less technologicaldeterminists than McLuhan, his analysis sets thestage for embedded virtuality.7

Invisibility and ExposurePervasive computing enhances what we can know,where we can know it, and how immediate it willbe. As when Muybridge showed stop-frame actionin his time-sequence photographs, infrared sensors,microsensors, and processors can network together

to build a dynamic portrayal of what otherwisecould not be known. Doctors can track the real-timeprogress of an ingested medication or see the inter-nal anatomical details of a surgery patient; �re�ght-ers can get critical information about the �re as itrages and their rescue efforts; the migration ofendangered whales can be closely monitored.

“Visualization technologies” provide access intowhat was opaque, knowledge where there was pre-viously ignorance, bringing close what had beenremote—all these capabilities of pervasive comput-ing transform our ideas about space. Now thatpolice equipped with increasingly common thermalimaging technology (and a search warrant8) candrive past a house and “peer through” the walls,our ideas about not only privacy, but the wallsthemselves must change. Even stranger is the use ofthe same imaging to see where a person hasbeen—sensors of the past tense. (See Figure 3.)This new technology goes beyond the often-mentioned collapse of distance promulgated by fax,telephone, or overnight delivery. It also representsthe possibility of new knowledge that will enhancesafety, inform action, and provide perspective. Pub-licly accessible monitors that display moment-by-moment readings of everything from water qualityto activity in the public square to traf�c patternscan provide a type of information previouslyunavailable and potentially community enhancing.Pervasive computing can open up the workings ofan otherwise inaccessible mystery, whether that bethe performance of a building’s structure in anearthquake or the nanny’s behavior while mom anddad are at work. There is an irony here: it is invisi-ble, miniaturized sensors that make formerly inac-cessible realms visible.

That irony of pervasive computing is related tolong-standing critical inquiry into the relationship ofseeing and being seen. For example, Roland Barthescharacterized the mythical status of the Eiffel Towerexplicitly in these terms: because it “transgressesthis separation, this habitual divorce of seeing andbeing seen; it achieves a sovereign circulationbetween the two functions; it is a complete object

which has, if one may say so, both sexes of sight.”9

As such, it attracts meaning like a lightning rod. Thedigitally embedded city, strewn with sensors, perva-sively monitored and actuated, is fundamentally theopposite of the Eiffel Tower. De-monumentalized,the seeing transpires with a spatial disconnect—notfrom a distance, but from somewhere else. The pos-sibility of being seen, on the other hand, is every-where. But, without the identi�able point of obser-vation (the top of the Eiffel Tower, the center of thepanopticon), surveillance becomes pernicious—potentially everywhere, by any agency, for unknownpurposes. Embedded systems create the opposite ofmonument, the opposite of geographic centered-ness, the opposite of subjectivity and objectivity.Consider the extensive implementation of closed-circuit TV in London as well as other cities in GreatBritain. Journalist Jeffrey Rosen found that thecameras, intended to reduce terrorism, were primar-ily used to watch hookers, girls in tight T-shirts, andyoung men of color. Expected to protect society,bored security guards become voyeurs, reasserting

Immanent Domain:Pervasive Computing and the Public Realm

46

their own discriminatory stereotypes and sending achill over public behavior.10

In privacy debates, some take the position thatsignage to the effect of “camera surveillance inoperation” must be required. But how far shouldthe signage go? It could also post: “by the LondonPolice,” “your facial features will be scrambled,” or“connected to Interpol database.” Such signageunder our current assumptions of the city is thepublic space equivalent of Duchamps’s “Ceci n’estpas une pipe.” Being watched for unclear purposesby uncertain authority contradicts basic notions ofpublic space.11 The uncertainty goes hand in handwith nanotechnologies, with embeddedness, withsurveillance, and even closed-circuit TV. UnlikeMaupassant who could choose to dine in the EiffelTower to both escape its presence and reverse itsrelation to the city, the surveillance state is intrinsi-cally omnipresent. There is no escape except per-haps to exhibitionism.

Private and PublicExhibitionism, the tendency to show off somethingthat is generally held to be private, is part ofmodernity and has long had its spatial component.When Napoleon III and Georges Eugene Haussmannopened the great boulevards of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, cutting swaths throughworking-class neighborhoods to link axial monu-ments, they also ushered in modern urban life.Baudelaire wrote about this new uni�ed city space,a space of human activity and physical connected-ness. Wide sidewalks, streets lined with trees, cafes,and multitudes of citizens from across Paris came tocharacterize the city. A new public realm was made,and with it came a new de�nition of the sixteenth-century dialectic between public and private. Bysome accounts, these highly public gestures createdthe frame for a kind of anonymity, so that thestreet both concealed and exposed its drama simul-taneously. Marshall Berman, in his analysis ofmodernity, says, “For lovers, . . . [Haussmann’s Pari-sian] boulevards created a new primal scene: aspace where they could be private in public, inti-mately together without being physically alone.”12

Haussmann’s boulevards shaped the moderncity, opening intimacy to publicity across Paris, butthey also promoted state control of the physicalwhole and the populace. A parallel transformation isoccurring in our own decade: the reformulation ofpublic and private urban life resulting from asophisticated, digital connectivity. Even now, wire-less networks available to cell phones and a variety

of handheld devices enable people in public spaceto engage in a new primal scene: a space wherethey can be private in public, but, unlike Hauss-mann’s Paris, intimately involved with no one inti-mate present, surrounded only by the company ofstrangers. Wireless internet already exists at of�ces,airports, and college campuses, and more recentlycommercial establishments like Starbucks are insti-tuting their own networks available to customers fora fee. The results are paradoxical: greater connectiv-ity coupled with increased isolation, intimacy pairedwith distance, privacy with publicity. Although themultiple effects of pervasive computing will taketime to comprehend, new displays of intimacy andtheir dismal shadow, terrorism, are enabled bytransformations of visibility, privacy, and publicity.

Some of the effects of pervasive computingare clearly extensions of those wrought by the tele-phone and the automobile, heightening individualprivacy in the city, collapsing spatial distance, andrestructuring physical space. But some conse-quences are unique to the electronic age. Perhapsthe most profound effect concerns the realms ofpublic and private, traditionally separated by semi-public/semi-private zones. This continuum hasserved to describe regions of social life and spacefor centuries. Public life, public space, and publicman have stood for a certain notion of civility wherechance interactions among strangers produce a soci-etal tolerance. Many technological advances andsocial transformations have been accused of weak-ening the public sphere, including the automobileand the concomitant suburbs, the air conditioner,and the elevator and resultant skyscraper. However,only the most recent technological innovationsthreaten to dissolve the public-private continuum alltogether. This is possible when what was once con-sidered private is integrated and exposed in pub-lic—our intimacies (for example, cameras thatwatch bedrooms and bathrooms on reality TV) andour secrets (such as medical, legal, and �nancialdatabases linked to a national identity card).

In The Fall of Public Man, sociologist RichardSennett decries the crisis of public culture, arguingthat public life had succumbed to an ideology ofintimacy and personality, in turn sparking the trans-mutation of political into psychological order. If weagree with Sennett, then the eroded boundariesbetween public and private are merely further dis-solved by the advent of embodied virtuality. But,whereas Sennett saw public man in a free fall, itmay be that pervasive computing in some senserestores his notion “that people grow only by pro-cesses of encountering the unknown.”13 Might the

continuous representation of the unfamiliar, theunseen, and the remote counteract isolationism andwithdrawal from public life? Similar to the way thatJacob Riis’s photographs of the slums at the turn ofthe century showed “how the other half lives,”there are ways that remote sensing could exposepreviously hidden worlds. To adopt the view thatthe private is public requires the replacement ofSennett’s public man with a subject no longerbound by conventional public-private distinctions.

Privacy, at the other end of the traditionalpolarity, has been de�ned as the achievement ofdesired levels of boundary control and access.14

Thus, I have privacy if I can keep unwanted visitorsfrom my home or resist intrusions while engrossedin a book. Indeed, privacy has been formulated asthe central concept integrating sociospatial behav-ior. This notion of privacy hinges on individual sub-jectivity: my desired levels of access, my boundaries.It seems obvious to anyone experiencing “cell yell”(private cell phone conversations audibly broadcastto proximate strangers) that boundaries are dif�cultto establish, but it may be less obvious that theseboundaries are corroding. The continuum model,from private to semi-public to public, might insteadbe replaced by a nested metaphor in which publicityhas infected privacy in every conceivable context,and vice versa. Moreover, embedded networksundermine the pretense that we control our envi-ronment or our boundaries within it—a pretensethat is fundamental to the construct of privacy.

The usurpation of privacy by means of tech-nology is a modern phenomenon but not a newone. Indeed, the concerns about pervasive comput-ing’s intrusion into everyday routines were echoedin Rudofsky’s 1955 book on American domesticityand an unnervingly diminished solitude in daily life.He worried about media technologies replacing con-versation with mere listening:

The latest invention in the art of listeningintroduces a prankish element into what is leftof social intercourse. The pocket recorder, agadget heralded as “of unparalleled useful-ness,” can be counted upon to remove the lastdregs of privacy from our lives. Originallydesigned for military and diplomatic secret ser-vice, it enables everyone to strike out a line ofone’s own murky practices; . . . “Just stick it ina pocket and pin a tiny mike under your lapel(or wear the facsimile wristwatch mike!)—[thejoyous exclamation point is theirs, not mine]—and you can record the words of anythingwithin about twenty feet; you simply put yourhand in your pocket and �ick a silent switch.”

47 cuff

What, one may ask, makes the promoters ofthe new furtiveness so sure that we shall keepon talking?15

He goes on to imagine counterspying techniques,like scattering “anti-acoustic confetti” all over ourhouses. Sounding like an inversion of the “smartdust” being developed for military purposes, Rudof-sky’s concerns may have been technologically pre-scient but socially off base. Legal privacy standardsmaintain social norms, but, at the same time, socialnorms evolve so that “the last dregs of privacy” arerede�ned. Perhaps the increasing numbers of sur-veillance cameras will have no more chilling effecton social life than did the tape recorder. But, on theother hand, one could say Rudofsky’s worry wasmerely misplaced: Walkmans, not secret listeningdevices, are the pocket recorder’s greatest blow tosocial intercourse.

If our awareness of the new social roles forwireless technologies was growing before September11, 2001, it became our collective nightmare as last,loving calls were made from cell phones at the topof the World Trade Center and from within thefourth airliner before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Asit turned out, terrorists too were linked by cellulartechnologies that suited their mobile, network-structured organization. In the wake of 9/11, a sur-veillance society lurks. We can look again at thecase of Great Britain: after terrorist attacks in Lon-don in the early 1990s, installation of closed-circuitcameras to surveil city streets and squares increaseddramatically. In 1994, 79 city centers had surveil-lance systems; there were 440 such systems by1998; and by 2001 there were more than 2.5 millionsurveillance cameras across Britain. There, the aver-age citizen is photographed three hundred timeseach day.16 By contrast, the average American wasphotographed seven times a day in 2001 by surveil-lance cameras. Since 9/11, there has been a prolif-eration of surveillance systems like the one hundredcameras proposed for Times Square, and three hun-dred for Los Angeles International Airport.

The effect of ubiquitous surveillance cannotyet be known, but it is clear that security interestsof the state have negative consequences for indi-vidual privacy. The Patriot Act, signed into law justone month after 9/11, expedites counterterrorismefforts by easing restrictions on electronic surveil-lance. Our online activities are more likely to bemonitored, and data is easier to collect from Inter-net service providers in what is often called “domes-tic spying.” In Washington, D.C., police activated a“command center” after 9/11 to monitor in inte-grated ways criminal databases and surveillancecameras that operate in “shopping areas, streets,monuments, and other public places in the U.S.capitol.”17 Proposals for a “smart” national identitycard resurface regularly, with computer chips toidentify the user, limit access, and track the user’scriminal history, location, travel speed, and �nancialtransactions, for starters.

We can be certain that privacy will not be theonly terrain in which social impacts will result. Soci-ologist Anthony Giddens describes the “disembed-ding” mechanisms of modernity. By this he meansthose mechanisms that break apart social relationsacross space and time and that remove local controlof resources, services, information, and even themechanisms themselves. Pervasive computing usedas a tool of surveillance is a disembedding, abstractmechanism, because the sensors, processors, andactuators are anonymous. Thus, although anyabstract system requires trust of the anonymous(such as that nuclear reactors are built well enoughto withstand terrorist attacks), that trust is inter-twined with intrinsic doubt. The streets are sur-veilled by the police, yet we know that the policeare not always trustworthy and that surveillancesystems can be hacked. The pervasiveness of thesystems is astounding: as early as 1998, a map of“every camera, public or private, which records peo-ple in public space” in Manhattan documented2,397 such cameras.18

It may be the urban designer’s task to createphysical space or new forms of visibility to restore

social bonds. In their project entitled “Refresh,”architects Diller ` Sco�dio created a project from adozen of�ce webcams. (See Figure 4.) In consider-ing why these cameras exist, the architects say

The live cam phenomenon can be thought ofas a public service, or a mode of passive adver-tisement, or it may be a new type of exhibi-tionism, or self-disciplinary device. The desireto connect to others in real time may be drivenby a response to the “loss” of the public realm.But however varied the motives, live cam viewsalways seem casual and lacking dramatic inter-est and content; they appear unmediated.Despite this apparent innocence, cameras arewillfully positioned, their �eld of vision is care-fully considered, and behavior within that �eldcannot help but anticipate the looming pres-ence of the global viewer.19

In such applications reside possibilities for critiqueand modi�cation of pervasive surveillance. And thecritique emanating from the arts can spark debatethat contributes to evolving social norms. ConsiderLars Spuybroek’s D-Tower project for Doetinchem inthe Netherlands. The whimsical multimedia projectincludes a web site that surveys participating towns-

4. Diller and Sco�dio’s �rst web art project, for the Dia

Foundation, investigates live of�ce webcams.

Immanent Domain:Pervasive Computing and the Public Realm

48

5. D-Tower (a tower, a questionnaire, and a web site) for

the city of Doetinchem. (Project by Lars Spuybroek of

NOX studio in Rotterdam, in collaboration with artist Q.S.

Sea�jn, 1998–2003.)

people’s emotions on a monthly basis, and thoseemotions are in turn displayed in differing coloredsurfaces of the tower: when it is deep red, pas-sersby know the town is feeling more love and hap-piness than hate and fear. (See Figure 5.)

Public LifeThe preceding examples hint at possible ways thatpervasive computing will nudge a newly de�nedpublic life into existence. It will be part of the his-torical trajectory of technology’s sociospatial impli-cations for public life, as is the development ofplate glass with the resultant shop window, and thetelevision with the interiorization of residentialspace. In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (cyberneticorganisms, like us), Donna Haraway argues that dig-ital capabilities will transform everyday life: “Nolonger structured by the polarity of public and pri-vate, the cyborg de�nes a technological polis basedpartly on a revolution of social relations in theoikos, the household.”20 Just as Haraway sees therestructuring of the previously private household,there are parallels in the public sphere where com-mon ground grows more individuated and privatizedbecause of wireless technology. And public spacecan incorporate, even publicize, that which wasremote and inaccessible: a town broadcasts its emo-tions, or a school projects the children’s collabora-

tive art project as it develops or webcasts theirmusic lesson.

Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon captureda formal-social symbiosis, whereby a spatial modelarose to typify and exemplify a complex nexus incultural history. Koolhaas’s description of the sky-scraper as proximate stacking of unrelated lives cap-tured the essence of the twentieth century. Theimmanent equivalent is the city of embodied virtu-ality: the cyburg for cyborgs. The embedding of tinycomputers and their networks into the city bringspromise and uncertainty. Creating a realm of dis-persed displacement, surveillance aims toward aparticular space or spaces. It—and we know notwhat or who it is—observes us and our actions,emotions, histories, and reactions. These observa-tions may be known to us (screening for passenger-carried weapons at airports), uncertain to us (visiblecameras linked to unknown processors, such as facerecognition systems and criminal data bases), oropaque to us (cyber-interceptions of potential ter-rorist communications). Thus, the actuated environ-ment, our actuated surroundings, can now “man-age” not only that which is capable of being seenand known, but also that which is not capable ofbeing seen, and about which we remain ignorant.

In a realm of dispersed displacement, discourseabout centers and margins becomes irrelevant. Forlovers walking hand in hand while speaking simulta-neously by cell phone to their respective spouses,spatial dislocation is crucial and unquestioned. Inthis they remain secure. But they cannot be certaineven about the immediate other: with whom is shespeaking? Is she with me, or is she elsewhere? Inthis context, the other is not just distracted; neitheris she absent. Instead, she is both present andabsent in a way that was not possible prior to wire-less technologies whereby everywhere is connected.There is no spatial logic nor spatial guarantees forintimacy. Publicity likewise embodies uncertainty.Public life is spatially located but also displaced anddispersed, requiring new logics and new physicalforms.

ConclusionThe age of pervasive computing is immanent; itsimplications for architecture and for the city are justbeginning to emerge. It is clear that ubiquitous andmobile systems will alter fundamental ideas aboutpublic and private, civic life, invisibility, and environ-mental agency. Each of these terrains is situatedwithin the domain of design, giving rise to newarchitectural concerns. The existing literature pro-jects consequences with either a utopian tone (aswith Weiser’s seminal article of 1991 and WilliamMitchell’s e-topia) or a dystopic view (such asRosen’s essay on British CCTV).21 Instead, in thispreliminary expoloration of issues, I have tried topresent a double view, utopian and dystopian,equally aware of the promise and uncertainty thatlies within embedded networks. Under such circum-stances, the architects goal must be to embed civil-ity in a pervasively computerized public realm.

If the “public geography of a city is civilityinstitutionalized” and if civility is, as Sennett puts it,“treating others as though they were strangers andforging a social bond upon that social distance,”then the designer must invent means to embed thepossibility of civility into both new pervasive tech-nologies and new urban geographies.22 What does itmean to embed civility in the public sphere? I wouldoffer three linked guiding principles—information,choice, and control—which architects must �ndways to embody in physical form. The �rst goal isto provide useful information about the embeddednetworks so that the public maintains an awarenessabout otherwise imperceptible systems. Informationthen contributes to people’s ability to make choicesabout their public lives, and simultaneously returnsto them a degree of control. A parallel from the1960s and early ’70s: the Vietnam War protests and“love-ins” that rejuvenated life in urban America’spublic sphere were catalyzed by television broad-casting. Anti-surveillance web camera performancesin public settings are a similar phenomenon. Until

49 cuff

6. Digital House. (Project by Hariri and Hariri, 1998.) Both

interior and exterior walls are liquid crystal displays in this

demonstration of new electronic technology for House

Beautiful magazine.

7. Spuybroek’s water pavilion for the Ministry of Water

Management and the Destra Expo (1994–1997) in the

Netherlands. The building incorporated digital sensors to

activate light, sound, and projections according to the

visitors’ movements through the space.

awareness of pervasive computing is heightened,the lack of public debate restricts architecture’s fullparticipation in the project to embed civility.

Nevertheless, the simultaneous existence ofcyberspace and cyburg space creates a sociospatial-digital arena like none before. It’s origins are inher-ently modern: the modern world of contradictionand display, and where, as Marx famously put it, “allthat is solid melts into air, all that is holy is pro-faned.” In Giddens’s conception of the late-moderncondition of increasingly abstract systems, he citesintensifying conditions of risk and danger. Withinhis array of risks, one component is the createdenvironment or socialized nature. This is “the infu-sion of human knowledge into the material environ-ment.” Giddens identi�es rightly “the altered char-acter of the relation between human beings and thephysical environment.”23 What I have called theenacted environment, Weiser’s embodied virtuality,is knowledge extended such that the material envi-ronment is infused also with intelligent action andreaction, data gathering, surveillance, and net-worked information. The intensity of risk increasessubstantially, but so can the intensity of experience.

Giddens concludes his exegesis of modernitywith the ways it might be engaged, which parallelthe ways an era of embodied virtuality could beengaged: pragmatic acceptance, sustained opti-mism, cynical pessimism, and radical engagement.The last is the domain architects and urbanists mustinhabit when designing to provide information,choice, and control. Radical engagement, or whatGiddens at one point calls utopian realism, is indeedthe ken of designers who use their expertise toreveal, contradict, play with, or intervene in perva-sive computing. As a �rst step, designers are pro-jecting information on surfaces that were formerlystatic. (See Figure 6.) Works are increasingly inter-active and customized. (See Figure 7.) Here, theopportunities for informed choice and control cangrow in complexity, sophistication, and diversityover the coming decade. The immanent domain of anewly public realm depends upon it.

Notes

1. See David A. Fahrenthold and David Nakamura, “Council Attacks D.C.

Surveillance Cameras,” Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2002: B01. There is a

growing literature and spreading activist movement against the recent,

rapid expansion of video surveillance systems. Two web sites document-

ing activist projects are from the New York Civil Liberties Union

(www.mediaeater.com/cameras/) and from Washington DC’s Electronic

Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org/privacy/surveillance/).

2. Cyberspace was �rst coined by science �ction writer William Gibson,

then taken up in architecture by writers like Michael Benedikt in Cyber-

space: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) and Christine

Boyer in Cybercities (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).

3. From “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” John Perry

Barlow, who �rst applied sci-� writer William Gibson’s term cyberspace

to the digital social space enabled by the Internet. See http://www

.eff.org/;barlow/Declaration-Final.html.

4. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, Mark Poster, ed. (Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press, 1988), p. 29.

5. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 283.

6. The formal likenesses between physical urban infrastructure—the

sidewalks, streets, systems of parks, sewers, and electrical grids— and

pervasive computing networks facilitate each one’s absorption of the

other.

7. McLuhan also recognized the connection between space, society, and

technology. In his discourse on the book he says, “Printing, a ditto

device, con�rmed and extended the new visual stress. It created the

portable book, which men could read in privacy and isolation from oth-

ers.” Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Ran-

dom House, 1967), p. 50.

8. See Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court decision regarding pri-

vacy and thermal imaging searches. “Justices Say Warrant Is Required in

High-Tech Searches of Homes,” New York Times, June 12, 2001.

9. These are Barthes’ italics. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies

Richard Howe, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), p. 5.

10. Jeffrey Rosen’s informative essay entitled “A Watchful State,” was

published just after 9/11 in New York Times Magazine, Oct. 7, 2001:

38–43, 85, 92–93.

11. For a comprehensive and articulate discussion of the changing

notions of public space, see Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib

Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown (Berkeley: UC Press, 1998).

12. Marshal Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Pen-

guin, 1982), p. 152.

13. This is the concept of public life constructed by Richard Sennett in

his seminal book, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1977), p. 295.

14. Irwin Altman offered this classic de�nition of privacy in The Envi-

ronment and Social Behavior (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1975).

15. Bernard Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford,

1955), p. 196.

16. Jeffrey Rosen, “A Watchful State,” New York Times Magazine,

Oct. 7, 2001.

17. Reuters, “Washington Plans Unprededented Camera Network,” New

York, Feb. 13, 2002.

18. See www.mediaeater.com/cameras.

19. See http://www.diacenter.org/dillersco�dio/intro.html.

20. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and

Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15/2, 80 (March-April

1985): 67.

21. Mitchell’s e-topia argues that digital technology will transform the

city in myriad positive ways (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000).

22. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1977), p. 264.

23. These two quotes are taken from Anthony Giddens’ The Conse-

quences of Modernity. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990),

pp. 124, 127.