The Ideas Bazaar

The 'burbs

The suburbs. Victims of abuse and scorn and the net curtain twitching middle classes. A new exhibition at the London Transport Museum explores the suburbs and Joe Moran, that  ethnographer of the mundae par excellence, has written a short piece for the FT outlining some of the cultural contributions of the suburbs:

His list of the top five is as follows:

1. The semi-detached house
2. The great British sitcom
3. Pop music
4. J.G. Ballard

But in second place he lists poet John Betjeman with the following justification:

"Brought up in Highgate, Betjeman is the poet laureate of suburbia – especially of “Metroland”, the area of northwest London served by the Metropolitan line, and the subject of his celebrated 1973 television documentary. Perhaps his loveliest poem about suburbia is “A Subaltern’s Love Song”, a paean to a young Surrey woman called Joan Hunter Dunn and her world of “the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin” and golf club dances in leafy Camberley with its “mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells”".

All of which put me in mind of some much earlier poetical 'abuse' of the suburbs by William Cowper from as early 1781

Suburban villas, highway-side retreats, 

That dread the encroachment of our growing streets, 

Tight boxes neatly sash’d, and in a blaze

With all a July sun’s collected rays

Delight the citizen, who, gasping there

Breath clouds of dust, and calls it country air.  

I came across this when exploring the idea of suburbs in the context of an Indian city in the 1990s in Marc Girourd's Cities and People, an inspiring and wide ranging book on the relationship between people, culture and the built environment spanning centuries and continents. That work, if nothing else, points to the cultural and historical shifts that have shaped the definitions of suburbs. To quote from my thesis: 

The early uses of the term suburb in English refer to the areas outside the centre of the city: suburb was used in a pejorative sense to refer to these areas as sites of licentiousness, impropriety and ill-discipline.  By the eighteenth century, a reversal of this original meaning had occurred (Archer 1997: 29) and so, in South Asia, the suburb became the spacious, orderly area, where the task of government was discharged and where those responsible for it could reside.  The confluence of ideas about architecture with those of race and disease (King 1980:12), and the representational imperatives of authority and government, resulted in the Cantonment areas of cities in which there was a British presence.  The geographical discreteness reflected the paradoxical nature of the Raj; attempting control of, but remaining aloof from, its subjects.

With this reversal of the meaning of the suburbs in cities like London, linked to demographic and economic changes, came a rethinking of the nature of leisure; places of work and leisure became distinct.  The suburbs became the inverse of the hub - sites of inactivity, lack of productivity.  Archer concludes that this was not just a matter of taste, or of geographical dispersions based on economics and organised transport, but predicated on a change of consciousness which anchored identity in the “autonomous self rather than in a social...collective” (Archer 1997: 41, original emphasis).  With the inversion of the meaning of suburb such areas grew both as a product of, and an escape from, the expanding cities.  In the process, suburbs became areas with claims to physical distance, social distinction and cultural control (Silverstone 1997: 5) It was the city centres that now stood for what the suburbs had previously represented: areas of licentiousness and ill-discipline. 

 

I used PowerPoint

Back from EPIC2008 and the dust is settling. That post-conference euphoria, a sense of existential communitas created by being in seclusion amongst like minded individuals soon dissipates on return to the cube farm. I'm going to commit some more thoughts and feelings on the conference in a day or two but for now, some brief navel gazing on my own presentation.

I enjoyed giving it, not least because I enjoyed doing the research and I genuinely think it surfaced important issues relating to ageing and independent living, which are relevant from a wide range of perspectives (technology, policy, public health etc). However, it is also nice to present material you know well and feel passionate about (apologies for use of the most over-used and abused word in business).

However, it was difficult to boil the paper down into a short talk with slides. (Download epic_full_paper_v21.09.08.pdf - still not yet totally locked and loaded but near enough final draft). I think I managed to get the main points across, though I think the style that I adopted possibly got in the way of the paper's arguments a bit. I mean, and I do mean this, I didn't mean to be funny but I obviously used turns of phrase that people found funny - "sensing the sh=t of out the home" etc. As someone said, a bit of humour during a talk is like a spoonful of sugar. No doubt a good thing in moderation. I hope it didn't get in the way. If it did I think you'll find the full version less than a bundle of laughs and worthy of selection into the conference.

As i said on the day, if you want to look at the much longer report we wrote on conclusion on the project mid 2007 then please let me know (I'm not able to post it) and you might also be interested in the Transportation and Mobility related posts on the blog.

UPDATE: Full draft proceedings for the conference available here

"Taxi"

Anyone getting in a cab at Dublin airport will be promptly told by the driver that there are now more cabs in County Dublin than New York city and that their livelihood is threatened both by the regulators and the fact that there are too many cabs. Perhaps those regulating the cabs of NYC feel they have a problem too, or at least are thinking out into the future as to how taxis should be run.

"Taxi 07 Roads Forward, a collaborative effort of the New York City TLC (Taxi and Limousine Commission) and the Design Trust for Public Space, is a comprehensive look at the taxi industry and the ways in which it could better serve the public over the next decade."

The output is a strongly designed, user-centred flavoured report, available here.

The Self Sustaining Serendipity Engine?

I don’t quite get Dopplr. Yet.

Maybe I’m missing something, maybe I’m looking too hard. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place. Or perhaps what I’m looking for (I don’t know what it is) is yet to be built.

First, let’s say this. Dopplr seems to be doing lots right. It is getting really good press and there’s no shortage of buzz around it. And, for sure, the team seem to have done much right. I liked the way they scaled gradually, using the law of cultural supply and demand to create some interest in Dopplr as it emerged from private beta to ‘corporate beta’, to ensure that it scaled as a platform and that each tweak and development worked. And it is an elegant thing. The UI and the copy is nice (although I’m not sure I get why people are waxing so lyrical about it). The Dopplr blog keeps the faithful in the know as the venture progresses. The Facebook app gives succour to those for whom FB is ‘the platform’ – the thing that made walled gardens respectable again. It syncs up with Flickr. And with iCal.

So there is much to be praised, admired, respected and probably copied. But still I have to say I’m not sure I get it yet. I can’t see what it’s adding to the sum total of my life experiences. I don’t see how it will make money and I don’t see how it is immunised against boredom. Let’s look at the buzz bit first.

There is no doubt that Dopplr is very much of the now. It is Web 2.0-ey and it plugs into meatspace / the real world of people/atoms. As a recent piece in The Economist pointed out, the meshing of web and world has never been more evident.

With Web 2.0 buzz is almost everything. Without critical mass there is no value, at two levels. One, if there is no buzz, there is no one there and if no one (friends, family or friends of friends etc) is there then there is little value in ‘me’ being there. Second, if there is no buzz then I won’t visit something – be it a website, or pay attention to it (in this case emails and alerts that something with some buzz entails. But when the buzz has burnt out, what’s left? The online remains of your identity festering on an unvisited piece of the web. Another site for which you can’t quite recall the password and email combination you used to register in the first place. An exodus to another place - witness the mass migration from Myspace to Facebook this year. What will be 2008’s Facebook?

(Credit)

Ten Things: Mobility in Later Life

For me, much of this year has been spent understanding the impact of mobility on the lives of older people. My team and I wrote a report on our ethnography with five rural transport projects in Ireland – contact me for a copy. We also sponsored some students from the RCA to think through the issue which led to this publication.

It is hard to summarise or emphasise enough, the value, of transportation services for people with no simple recourse to public transport or their own vehicle – it has the ability to transform their quality of life and forces a re-evaluation of what ageing-in-place could or should mean. The following ten things are based on a quite specific study on community transportation projects for rural Ireland that tend to be used, but are not specifically designed for, older people. Perhaps these are too obvious? Perhaps, but then it is often worth stating the obvious, especially to those who live highly mobile, connected and urban lives and need confronting with the different reality of increasing numbers of the world’s older population, especially those who live rural lives.

1. Older people express a strong desire to experience the world beyond the home

2. Increased mobility and the shift to cities by younger people, leaves older people feeling less mobile – mobility is a relative phenomenon, especially in a county like Ireland with the fastest growing car ownership rates in Europe (after Greece).

3. Lack of access to transport services reduces opportunities for independence and autonomy and creates a sense of obligation and dependency – dependency is something older people are hugely keen to avoid.

4. Access to basic healthcare resources – doctors, chemist, dentist and hospital – requires mobility

5. Transportation initiatives emerge from, and weave together, a huge variety of community services and resources – community transport does exactly what it says on the tin.

6. Mobile lives are sociable lives – mobility is valued for all it enables, not just the journey. Transport is more than the simple displacement of people to places.

7. The community transport buses support independence because they addresses necessities while making them appear as choices.

8. Transportation is a platform that links people to places, peoples and resources. It is both social engine and glue

9. Community transport projects provide an essential service to a population who have few opportunities for social interaction or for access to healthcare and services

10. Transportation is inexplicably missing in many accounts of ageing – yet it frequently appears near the top of the issues that older people regard as important.

Ethnography, Transportation and Older People

With ethnography so in vogue nowadays there is barely a domain, particularly one where commercial opportunity might present itself, that does not have an ‘ethnographic’ study conducted on it.

When my team at Intel started to conduct some work examining mobility and transportation for older people I assumed that there must be some major study somewhere that examines, qualitatively or ethnographically, the mobility of older people. It turned out, initially at least, that this is not the case. Yes, there have been some major studies in a European context (I’m thinking particularly of MOBILATE) but this is stronger on the quantitative front than empathetically communicating the value and impact of transport (or lack of it) on older people’s lives. There is of course a good deal of work on transportation and mobility for older people – from within variety of academic domains; psychology, geriatrics, gerontology, transportation studies – but nothing we could find that unpicked these issues ethnographically.

Conducting research in a vacuum like this has its advantages of course. We had a blank canvas. We read the literature but designed our ethnographic research without the dubious benefit of conventions to follow. The report Connections: Mobility and Quality of Life for Older People in Rural Ireland is now complete and read to distribute, though I’m not allowed to link to it and you need to email me at “simon dot w dot roberts at Intel dot com” if you want a copy.

The report is based on 5 weeks of ethnographic research – a week in each of five projects that are funded by the Irish government through the Rural Transport Programme. We purposely focused the research on the entire transport system – drivers, project managers, older people, service providers and others whose lives or livelihoods are touched by these transport programmes.