Cycling in Philly

National Bike to Work Day

18 May 2012

Typical bike space in Philadelphia. Credit: Jacob Bjerre Mikkelson

Bike to Work Day is an important way to demonstrate the demand for better cycling infrastructure in Philadelphia. Washington D.C.’s September 2010 launch of Capital Bikeshare, has put more than 1,000 red rental bikes on the streets, accounting for nearly 2 million trips to date, and contributing to a 169% increase in the number of people commuting to work by bike (now at 3.1%).  New York and Los Angeles have begun to implement even larger bike-sharing systems, along with new bike lane infrastructure, and it is crucial that Philadelphia also do so in order to support a better urban environment and the kind of innovation economy that Drexel University hopes to develop here.

Philadelphia’s Greenworks 2035 plan specifically calls for efforts to be made to increase trips made by bicycles, and that this should be done by expanding infrastructure. It also explicitly calls for better bicycle connections to 30th St. Station, where Drexel University can be crucial to bringing this plan to life through its Strategic Plan. On average, 5 of every 100 commuters in Center City, West Philly and South Philly is on a bicycle (5.4%, 4.15% & 4.73% commuting by bike, respectively). 2 out of every 5 cyclists, is a woman.

The Spruce Street and Pine Street buffered bicycle lanes are the first the City has installed at the cost of a travel lane. As reported in the “Crosstown Connection | Pilot Project Findings” from MOTU by Andrew Stober (December, 2009), the Spruce and Pine street bike lane implementations of 2009/2010 have slowed the fastest driving cars, while simultaneously creating a safe cycling environment, and increasing order and smoothness of automobile vehicle flow. Ridership increased, and both serious vehicular crashes and fender benders saw significant decreases, while enabling the same average motor vehicle speed. Yet, two years later, in 2011, when the City tried to parlay those successes into support for two more buffered bike lanes (cutting through the East side of Center City on 10th and 13th Street), the plan was met with great resistance. It is time for Philadelphia to catch up with other major cities in the USA in implementing a modern bicycle infrastructure that will have beneficial economic and quality of life impacts across the city.

Dr. Sheller, Director of the mCenter, supervised two University of Arts students, Nicolas Coia and Dominic Prestifillipo, in their thesis for the Masters in Industrial Design on bike infrastructure in Philly, who will be hosting a panel discussion at Next American City’s Storefront for Urban Innovation (2816 W. Girard Ave) on May 31st, 6:30-8pm. The event on “The State of Cycling in Philadelphia” will have a short presentation on the challenges and opportunities of implementing bike infrastructure in Philadelphia. For more info:

http://americancity.org/events/detail/bringing-bike-share-to-philly

Neighborhood Roundtable

The Neighborhood Roundtable

photo © Andrew Leiser 2011 Neighborhood Narratives, Drexel, summer 2011

Friday, April 20th, 11am to 2pm

Macalister Hall, Rm. 2019-2020 (33rd & Chestnut St.), Drexel University

Working in partnership with a range of West Philadelphia community organizations, Drexel University recently initiated a set of community revitalization strategies along historic Lancaster Avenue. On April 20th (11am – 2pm), Drexel’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy is sponsoring a community conversation about the role artists might play in these Powelton, Mantua and Belmont neighborhood enrichment efforts. Can artists be catalysts for change? How and under what conditions? What does ideal collaboration between artists, institutions and the Lancaster community look like?

Co-hosted by Mimi Sheller (Director, mCenter: The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy) and Hana Iverson (Director, the Neighborhood Narratives Project) with support from the Center for Creative Research at NYU, The Neighborhood Roundtable will provide an opportunity for neighborhood and community representatives to engage in creative conversation about these issues with renowned artist/activists, Drexel students and faculty.

Please RSVP to mimi.sheller@drexel.edu 

Co-Moderators:

Mimi Sheller (Professor of Sociology; Director, mCenter@Drexel)

Hana Iverson (Drexel faculty; Director, Neighborhood Narratives; CCR Fellow)

Participants:

Lucy Kerman (Vice Provost for Community and Education)

Liz Lerman (Artist, Founding Artistic Director Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, CCR Founding Fellow)

Jawole Willa Jo  Zollar (Artist, Founder and Artistic Director Urban Bushwomen, CCR Founding Fellow)

Mark Christman (Representative from University City District: 38th Street/South)

George Stevens (President of the Lancaster 21st Century Business Organization)

James Wright (Representative Peoples’ Emergency Center: 38th Street/North)

 

Center for Creative Research and the Neighborhood Narratives Project

Artists and universities in the United States have long enjoyed the benefits of proximity to one another and are participants in a powerful, historically embedded and endlessly re-invented relationship with one another.  As major non-profit actors in American life, both are builders, makers and shapers of society’s values. In 2005, a group of mature choreographers came together to form the Center for Creative Research, in order to investigate and redefine how independent artists and institutions of higher learning could engage with one another. Key questions included, how can reciprocal relationships evolve between artists, institutions and communities, and how might these relationships facilitate mutually-beneficial exchanges between participants while increasing the depth of students’ experiential learning? As a nexus of this investigation, a collaboration was developed with the Neighborhood Narratives Project, a mobile locative media curriculum that engages students in a practice of situated story-telling incorporatingaspects of cultural and visual anthropology, ethnography, geography and, with the recent addition of CCR artists, the role of embodied practice in interdisciplinary investigation.  The Neighborhood Narratives Project is a vehicle to engage interactively and interconnect community, requiring students and artists to invite public participation, enabling organic growth of a community’s collective narrative and empowering citizens to embed social knowledge in the wired/wireless landscape of the urban environment.

 

Contact for Further Information: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

New Interaction Orders

New Interaction Orders, New Mobile Publics?

13-14 April 2012

Imagination Lab, Lancaster University, UK

This workshop explores the emergence of ‘mobile publics’, inspired by Goffman’s studies of  public places as the performative locus of social orders and William Holly Whyte’s investigations of the social life of small urban spaces. We bring theory and empirical research, everyday lived practice, design, policy and politics together through collaborative analysis  of multi-sited, mobile, ethnographic or otherwise qualitative studies of behavior in today’s public spaces.

Guest Speakers: Christian Licoppe — Keith Hampton — Mimi Sheller

mCenter Director Mimi Sheller will be speaking at 10am (ET) Friday

Watch Live Webcast here http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/new_interaction_order/webcast.htm

Equipped with mobile technologies, people connect in ways that were unthinkable when Goffman wrote Behaviour in public spaces (1963) and William Whyte explored The social life of small urban spaces (1980). The momentous Arab Spring events, London riots and ’2011 Occupy’ demonstrations are extreme examples that pose old questions about the ‘interaction order’ and its relation to social order and the public sphere in new ways. On the one hand, mobile connectivity enables micro-coordination of increasingly mobile everyday lives, new modulations of co-presence, absent presence and present absence, and transformations of socio-material practices of availability, obligation, intimacy and strangerhood in public. Some of the social innovations involved also shape emergent new practices of mobilising people in protests and crises. Arguably new, agile, local and globally networked communities and ‘mobile publics’ are forming. On the other, worries over a loss of civility, community, privacy, and new forms of surveillance enabled by the ever closer intermeshing of digital technology and everyday ‘movement-spaces’ fuel fears over an erosion of civil liberties and ‘capital P’ politics.

Goffman’s insistence that ‘the interaction order’ is the performative locus of such utopian and dystopian transformations and his and Whyte’s attention to detail are the motivation for this two-day interdisciplinary workshop. We would like to bring micro and macro, theory and empirical research, everyday lived practice, design, policy and politics together through collaborative analysis of multi-sited, mobile, ethnographic or otherwise qualitative studies of behaviour in today’s public spaces, zeitdiagnostic theory and avantgarde design. We invite researchers, designers, technology developers, architects, urban planners, artists and urban communities to submit contributions that explore aspects of new and old ‘behaviour in public spaces’, including (but not limited to):

1. the ‘osmotic’ relationship between physical and virtual spaces, connectivity and mobility
2. the social life of such spaces
3. emergent principles and practices of the 21st Century interaction order
4. augmented embodied and sensory phenomenology and material agency
5. links between the interaction order, public engagement, and public space
6. tensions between mobile informationalized everyday lives and movement-spaces and principles of privacy and civil liberty, security, splintering and sorting of ‘access’
7. examples, practices and impacts of improvised communities and mobile publics, and collective intelligence
8. examples and methods of collaborative, experimental, radically careful and carefully radical design of new practices, technologies, forms of public engagement and spaces
9. reflections on the links between theory, empirical studies, design and politics in the broadest sense

Organisers: Chris Boyko, Monika Büscher, Tim Dant, Jill Ebrey, Pauline Feron, Karenza Moore, Jen Southern, Katherine Willis

Contact: p.feron@lancaster.ac.uk

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/new_interaction_order/index.htm

Mobile Publics Workshop

Call For Papers

New interaction orders, New mobile publics?

13-14 April 2012

Lancaster University, UK

Equipped with mobile technologies, people connect in ways that were unthinkable when Goffman wrote Behaviour in public spaces (1963) and William Whyte explored The social life of small urban spaces (1980). The momentous Arab Spring events, London riots and ‘2011 Occupy’ demonstrations are extreme examples that pose old questions about the ‘interaction order’ and its relation to social order and the public sphere in new ways.

On the one hand, mobile connectivity enables micro-coordination of increasingly mobile everyday lives, new modulations of co-presence, absent presence and present absence, and transformations of socio-material practices of availability, obligation, intimacy and strangerhood in public. Some of the social innovations involved also shape emergent new practices of mobilising people in protests and crises. Arguably new, agile, local and globally networked communities and ‘mobile publics’ are forming. On the other, worries over a loss of civility, community, privacy, and new forms of surveillance enabled by the ever closer intermeshing of digital technology and everyday ‘movement-spaces’ fuel fears over an erosion of civil liberties and ‘capital P’ politics.

Goffman’s insistence that ‘the interaction order’ is the performative locus of such utopian and dystopian transformations and his and Whyte’s attention to detail are the motivation for this two-day interdisciplinary workshop. We would like to bring micro and macro, theory and empirical research, everyday lived practice, design, policy and politics together through collaborative analysis of multi-sited, mobile, ethnographic or otherwise qualitative studies of behaviour in today’s public spaces, zeitdiagnostic theory and avantgarde design. We invite researchers, designers, technology developers, architects, urban planners, artists and urban communities to submit contributions that explore aspects of new and old ‘behaviour in public spaces’, including (but not limited to):

• the ‘osmotic’ relationship between physical and virtual spaces, connectivity and mobility
• the social life of such spaces
• emergent principles and practices of the 21st Century interaction order
• augmented embodied and sensory phenomenology and material agency
• links between the interaction order, public engagement, and public space
• tensions between mobile informationalized everyday lives and movement-spaces and principles of privacy and civil liberty, security, splintering and sorting of ‘access’
• examples, practices and impacts of improvised communities and mobile publics, and collective intelligence
• examples and methods of collaborative, experimental, radically careful and carefully radical design of new practices, technologies, forms of public engagement and spaces
• reflections on the links between theory, empirical studies, design and politics in the broadest sense

Please send a 300 word abstract to Pauline Feron: p.feron@lancaster.ac.uk by 24th February 2012. Notification of Acceptance 9th March 2012.

There is a small amount of financial support available for travel. If funds are an obstruction, please contact p.feron@lancaster.ac.uk

Dr Monika Buscher

Senior Lecturer / Director mobilities.lab

Part I Director

Centre for Mobilities Research

Department of Sociology

Lancaster University

LA1 4YD

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/cemore/

email: m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

 

Mobility and New Media

New Course for Winter 2011-2012!

SOC380-003 Mobility and New Media

Smart Cities - http://www.designforall.org

Course Description:

New forms of mobile communication, locative media, and “smart” infrastructure are changing the way we connect to other people, to information, and to places while on the move. Through mobile information and communications technologies (ICTs) more and more people are carrying portable digital devices with them, while the “material” infrastructures of transport, architecture, and borders are increasingly embedded with “virtual” data including embedded responsive software, GPS, RFID, sensors, satellite connectivity, and other forms of automated data transfer and interactivity. How are these mobile technologies transforming the distinction between private and public spaces, re-shaping urbanism and movement, and generating new forms of life on the move?

This course will introduce the emerging field of mobilities research as a new way to look at both the large-scale movements of people, objects, and information across the world, and the more local processes of daily transportation and movement through urban public space. We will draw on interdisciplinary approaches including sociology, cultural geography, communication and media studies; and methodologies including ethnography, discourse analysis, visual studies, and various new “mobile methods”.

Class Time:   T/Th 5-6:20pm                                               

Classroom:    PSA 114

Instructor:

Professor Mimi Sheller                                                                     

Office: Macalister 5011

Email: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu                                              

Tel: (215) 571-3652               

Augmented Avenue

Memories of Lancaster

Sponsored by the mCenter @ Drexel

Augmented Avenue: Memories of Lancaster is a collaborative art project for creative urban engagement that offers visitors a new way to experience the Lancaster Avenue neighborhood. Drexel University students worked in partnership with members of the community who narrated their stories and memories, together co-authoring a dynamic portrait of local history.  Each student interpreted that experience and co-created a photo and sound collage available through the smartphone, and on display at 3820 Lancaster Avenue from September 30^th to October 29^th, 2011 as part of the LOOK! On Lancaster Avenue Arts Project sponsored by the City of Philadelphia’s ReStore Corridors Through Art program. It can also be veiwed at http://lancasterave.tumblr.com.

 

Joe McNulty (University City District) and James Wright (People’s Emergency Center, PEC) with the students from Drexel's COM380 Neighborhood Narratives class

Led by Hana Iverson, the director of the Neighborhood Narratives project, this was a communications class project sponsored by Drexel University’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy (mCenter).  Iverson is a media artist whose projects span intermedia platforms and contexts, incorporating mobile narrative, augmented reality, and interactive installation. The students include: Alan Masse, Andrew Leiser, Aviva Linksman, Caitlin Bookman, Elizabeth Miller, Francesca Martelli, John Chagaris, Kerry Handschuh, Lily Strater and Melissa Reilly.

 

“I was very lucky to work with George Stevens on this project.  George grew up in this community and lives here now.  His pride, dedication, and responsibility to the community have given me a new found appreciation for Powelton.  Before working with George, I knew very little about the culture and history of the area in which I live, but now I too feel a sense of pride for my neighborhood.  Though I did not grow up here, I do consider this ‘home’ and my experience in working with Augmented Avenue has been incredibly enriching.”

– Lizz Miller, a junior studying communication

Lucy Kerman, Drexel’s Vice Provost for University and Community Relations, introduced the class to some key partners. Central to the experience were George Stevens, who organized all the neigborhood participants, Joe McNulty (University City District) and James Wright (People’s Emergency Center, PEC) who very generously came to the class, shared their expertise about the neighborhood and took the students for a detailed walking tour of Lancaster Avenue.

 

“The Augmented Avenue project took me out of my comfort zone and opened my eyes to a part of Philadelphia that I hadn’t previously gotten the opportunity to experience. As someone who typically stays within the confines of Drexel University and Center City Philadelphia, venturing into Lancaster Avenue was a stretch for me. However … I came out of the experience with an array of knowledge about the history of Lancaster Avenue, an idea of how the area operates in present day and valuable information about augmented reality and combining actual places and media experiences into one. Because of this project, I am no longer hesitant to venture past Drexel’s lines and into West Philadelphia.”

– Caitlin Bookman, a 5^th year Senior studying Communications, with a concentration in Public Relations

 

This project teamed up with Zooburst, a digital storytelling tool, as a simple way to create custom augmented reality experiences that can be viewed on a mobile device, such as an Android or iPhone. ZooBurst was created by Craig Kapp and is available at http://www.zooburst.com/. Craig Kapp is an interactive developer who has spent over ten years working to find ways to bring cutting edge digital technologies into educational settings. He helped the class realize their vision.

 

“Augmented Avenue has peaked my interest in local history. My initial impressions of the project were that of excitement and curiosity. I had heard the tech scene buzzword ‘Augmented Reality’ and was interested in it’s capability to change the way we educate ourselves and view our surroundings. Yet I had not considered it’s implications within the art world, nor fully realized the extent of our project. I enjoy viewing and creating art that has purpose. I feel that through the use of new technology we can share purposeful, deliberate creative experience in an exciting new medium.”

– Lily Strater, a graduating senior studying communication theory, public relations and psychology.

 

AAG 2012 Call for papers

Utopian/dystopian mobilities

ARCHIGRAM WALKING CITY

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers
New York, New York
February 24-28, 2012

Utopian/Dystopian Mobilities

Open Session Proposal in Mobilities Research organized by Mimi Sheller (Drexel University), Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (Roskilde University), Sven Kesselring (Technische Universität München) and Ole B. Jensen (Aalborg University).

Mobilities research touches upon crucial social and political imaginaries concerning the challenges and issues related to environmental problems, climate change, sustainability, social exclusion and new societal configurations of mobility as we face the planetary limits of growth (e.g. Dennis & Urry 2009, Urry 2011). In this session we want to bring to the forefront elements of radical thinking and imaginative envisioning that from time to time surface through utopian and dystopian speculation about the future. Whether in literary, social scientific, architectural, cinematic or other genres of spatial representation, the session aims to open up the interesting tensions in these visions of the future of mobility, both realized and virtual.

While the more utopian outlook emphasizes innovative and unprecedented solutions to future mobilities, many 20^th and 21^st century future visions of mobility may be argued to carry dystopian dimensions such as the end of capitalism as we know it or the collapse of urbanism (e.g., Lefebvre 1973/1976; Graham 2010). The session will focus on how to connect earlier utopian ideas related to technology and design (e.g. Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, LeCorbusier, Bauhaus, etc.) to the contemporary practices and discussions about ‘alternative mobilities’ (e.g. off-the-grid living, Transition Towns, local/slow movements, etc.) and connect these to imaginations of future mobile utopias and dystopias (e.g. post-carbon mobilities, zero-emission mobilities, low-energy futures, cybermobilities, etc.). The session aims to connect research within geographies of mobilities with projects of utopian and dystopian thinking that have often inspired actual designs and practices. It shall explore the creative potentials in a cross-fertilization of these fields of thought.

Key references

Dennis, K. & J. Urry (2009) After the Car, Cambridge: Polity Press

Graham, S.  (2010) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, London: Verso

Lefebvre, H. (1973/1976) The survival of capitalism, London: Allison & Busby

Urry, J. (2011) Climate Change and Society, Cambridge: Polity Press

Please submit abstracts no longer than 250 words, along with a brief bio and contact information, to the session co-organizer: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu by August 30th, 2011.  Those selected for the panel will then be asked to register for the meeting and submit their abstract on-line at: http://www.aag.org.  A copy of the abstract, along with your personal identification number (assigned by the AAG), should then be forwarded to the session organizer(s) no later than September 21, 2011 (The AAG Deadline is September 28th).

 

Battles of mobilities

Battles of mobilities? utopias for a different future

Special session at the 4th Nordic Geographers Meeting in Roskilde, Denmark, May 24-27, 2011

Planning cities with the goal of economic growth as the primary objective has been the way forward for cities during the last century.

Because of the firmly seated discourse that more mobility gives more growth, city planning has been centred on creating infrastructural systems, dominated by an autologic. The private car has been seen as the starting point for growth, alongside the logistic networks).

Today, we see cities where the consequences of these planning strategies are visible and showing. Especially larger cities are articulating the unintended consequences of mobility and their infrastructural systems. Sudjic (2007) conveys this in the book The Endless City saying that: “it may well be that cities are more often the product of unintended consequences than of anything else” (35).

Between 25-50 % of city space are used to facilitate automobility thus automobility has a strong grip on everyday life, and constitutes a great challenge for cities. It occupies a large amount of space, space that could be used for social and cultural activities.

Thus the question of mobility can be a discussion of equity and democracy in the city. Questioning the right and access to city space can for instance be seen through the international monthly event called Critical Mass where cyclists take over the streets stating “we are not blocking traffic, we are traffic”.

Mobility research has evolved during the last decade to understand and grasp these battles and new ways of understanding the city. New mobile social media, innovative social networks and arts are questioning movement and connectivity in new ways. Thus new cultures of mobility are emerging, as people challenges environmental issues, this demands all kinds of different solutions, new thinking, experimentation and living differently.

The session will  explore these themes, among others:

• Mobility conflicts and power struggles
• The right to the city
• Ambivalences of mobile everyday life
• Sustainable mobility

Interested participants should send an abstract of maximum 300 words before the 20th of January 2011 to Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (malenef@ruc.dk) or Jonas Larsen (jonslar@ruc.dk)

Malene Freudendal-Pedersen

Assistant professor, PhD

Roskilde University

Department for Environmental, Social and Spatial Change

House 10.1

Box 260

4000 Roskilde

Virtual Public Art

VPAP Q&A between Chris Manzione, founder of Virtual Public Art Project (VPAP), and Mimi Sheller, director of the mCenter@Drexel. The Q&A was conducted via email and is the first in what will be an ongoing conversation with Chris Manzione about VPAP and future applications of augmented reality.

Sheller will also be a Mellon Regional Fellow in the Penn Humanities Forum at University of Pennsylvania, where this year’s theme is “Virtuality”.

Breadboard has two projects planned with VPAP, one of which is set to launch in the Fall of 2010.

Mobility in Megacities Fellowship

Mobility Cultures in Megacities

The Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), a research facility of BMW Group, is pleased to announce an international call to researchers for up to 6 post-doctoral fellowships within the strategic field of “Mobility Cultures in Megacities”.

Megacities in 2015 (UN-2002)

Duration of Fellowship: 6 months (extension of 2 months possible)

Location: Munich, Germany

Academic Partners: Technische Universität München

Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Disciplines: Urban transport and mobility; social sciences with a specialisation in mobility and transport research; other fields of study directly related

Background and objectives

The major objective of the program is to generate a profound understanding of mobility patterns and mobility cultures in megacities in different parts of the world. Fellows with a regional background in these cities are asked to collaborate on a set of research questions in an attractive, interdisciplinary and intercultural environment. The characteristics and challenges of the cities shown in the map have already been analysed – those places are of specific interest for the fellowship program.

Key research interests include

• Identifying the characteristics, opportunities and constraints of the megacity studied like demographic, social, economic and regulatory conditions.
• Analyzing long-term mobility decisions like location choice/urbanization, motorization,

• Studying every-day mobility patterns like activity-chains, mode and destination choices in function of spatial structure and transport supply as well as underlying social motivations.
• Investigating mobility cultures, lifestyles, perceptions and attitudes in the respective cities and their “points of entry” in order to learn if and how they might change over time.
• Assessing stakeholder interaction, local planning and policy discourses and their cultural background in order to develop perspectives for “good governance“.
• Identifying challenges and developing strategies for the future of urban mobility.

Further information and address for submission of applications

Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo)

A Research Facility of BMW Group

80788 München

Germany

E-mail: irene.feige@ifmo.de

Website: http://www.ifmo.de/

Please visit http://www.ifmo.de for further details and background on the current research approach.