Personal Digital Urbanism: The Promise and the Mess of New Mobility Technologies

Abstract

The presence of digital technologies is expanding in professional planning practice and in everyday urban life. Recent research has asked what digitality does in cities, and answers by examining how these technologies produce novel practices, spaces, and social arrangements. In this dissertation, I extend this work by answering that one thing digitality does is that it promises. I focus specifically on the promises that digital technologies can allow the city to be known with certainty, and can solve its problems. I argue that this promise is dangerous in two ways. First, its abstract visions can never be completely realized in the particular socio-material messiness of the city, leaving those who had imagined digital objects satisfying their desires for certainty and solvability both disappointed that these were not achieved and underprepared to manage in their absence. Second, this promise is misleading in offering a vision of improving the city by transcending its messiness—infrastructures, environments, physical artifacts, personal desires, indeterminate actions, and political conflict—rather than recognizing such materiality and agency as both ineradicable and as essential to any social transformation. The dissertation is guided by an analytical approach that brings together the ideas of the promise and the mess, a theoretical bifocal capable of seeing the digital as both an imagined, desired ideal and a concrete, situated practice that I offer as a way to avoid tendencies to either overdetermine or under-politicize new technological practices.The empirical basis of the dissertation is a qualitative study of new mobility technologies, a case of the digitization of the city. New mobility refers to smartphone apps for real-time travel information, mobility services accessed primarily through an app interface, and supporting data infrastructures. The research has three components. First, a study of the visions for how digital technologies can address urban transportation challenges uses material from professional reports, interviews, and industry conferences to show that the promise of new mobility speaks to desires among planners to achieve certainty and solvability and to avoid the more difficult work of building infrastructure or changing behavior. Second, an examination of the development of data specifications and their use in monitoring and regulating Seattle’s bikeshare vendors examines the ways digitality translates the messiness of the street into data on the screen, and traces the conflicts that appear as digital visions are realized. Third, interviews and focus groups with 40 Seattle-based travelers, including young professionals and residents of senior living facilities, generated accounts of travelers’ situated experiences of the oscillation between the promises of app-based mobility services and the messiness of getting around. In these studies, I find that digitality can obscure as well as it reveals, and so should be used with care. I conclude by suggesting that we might more productively engage digitality by repoliticizing its promise, and by learning to live well with the mess of the city. The project urges planning to consider the promise of digitality as itself a kind of plan, and at the same time to make an active effort to plan beyond the digital.