Michael Batty

Exploring, Defining and Classifying Virtual Geographies

I was immediately struck by the title of the NCGIA initiative in that Geographies rather than Geography is emphasized. This is in contrast to the early thinking about the impact of new information technologies on geography in which a less pluralistic focus was adopted. For example, Mark Hepworth's (1989) book was called RThe Geography of the Information EconomyS and in much of the writing in the 1980s, there was an implication that the geography that was emerging might be all embracing in some way. Since then the vast proliferation of computers and communications which continues to take use by surprise - I defy anyone to say otherwise - has complicated the picture immensely and is probably pushing us to adopt a much more pluralistic approach.

I am conscious however of how diverse and complex the many geographies that are emerging are and how the study of geography itself is changing in countless ways. I think some part of this initiative should be devoted to classifying and deriving typologies, no matter how contingent and pragmatic, so that we have some chance of making better sense of what is happening. For example, I think a clearer distinction can be made between geographies which are being formally invented for diverse digital purposes, and geographies which are emerging as a function of using information technologies in activities that were hitherto independent of any digital processes. For example, new kinds of geography which are entirely dependent upon computer games, on internet communications, on manipulating software within and between computers have largely emerged as a consequence of computers and communications per se. Existing geographies which are being fast affected by the use of information technologies in production and consumption on the other hand are changing traditional non digital processes and the geographies which have developed around them. Thus my first distinction would be between new geographies of information and the changing old geography of information.

A second theme that I consider important is the distinction between geographies inside computers and geographies which result from communicating with computers. The latter is cyberspace in GibsonUs parlance, and although much of the new technology is drifting from inside computers to cyberspace - to the ether as it were - this distinction although changing will remain important. It is one of centering geography on the self, or on others and it clearly relates to the new geographies of node and nets, spaces and flows. For example, inside computers, all kinds of simulation involve both formally structured and informally organized geographies from games to CAD and GIS, as well as from the geography of the screen to the geography of software inside the machine. This might seem a diverse and eclectic bunch of perspectives on geography and one that has not particularly caught the interest of professional geography in the past but it there is little doubt that these new geographies provide a new sense of space and the spatial paradigm within contemporary societies. Cyberspace itself and all that goes with it is somewhat easier to pin down geographically because everything from IRC to email to web traffic can be seen in terms of traditional geographies as part of the space of flows. But how agents and actors are behaving in terms of these spaces is as opaque as ever, and harder to observe.

A third theme which is much more controversial for our study is the theoretical stance we might take on such matters. It is possible to write about any of the matters raised from a multitude of perspectives. For example, CastellUs recent book (1996) The Rise of the Network Society takes a somewhat low key but nevertheless explicit structuralist approach to the space of flows. Sherry TurkleUs (1996) Life on the Screen takes a somewhat informal postmodern approach, while Kevin KellyUs (1993) Out of Control takes a manifestly casual and perhaps journalistic approach. Some of the best writings on the information society are in this vein, and my plea would be to argue that such diversity is necessary and inevitable and that the NCGIA initiative should applaud this. I do not consider that everything about any geography of the information society should be grounded in deep social theory just as I would never argue that it should be grounded in the equally contentious language of evolution and competition where everything is seen as a triumph of the selfish gene. A plurality of viewpoints must be welcomed.

Let me try to summarize my approach to classification. I consider a threefold approach which is about manageable:

new geographies in contrast to changing but pre-existent geographies

geographies inside computers in contrast to geographies between computers, and

geographies from many viewpoints and theoretical perspectives
Mapping all these onto one another is a mammoth task and not necessary as such, but clear organization of the domain is in my view a prerequisite to good work. I have had a very preliminary go at writing about this in a paper I have called RVirtual GeographyS which is forthcoming in a rather interesting special issue of the journal Futures entitled RGeographic Perspectives on the FutureS which will come out later this year. If you want to look at the paper I have put it on our web site - if you point and click on http: //www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/mike then you will get it. ItUs very preliminary and I expect it will change a lot as I think more about it at conferences like the one we are to attend.

Case Studies of Virtual Geographies

My own specific interest which I would like to think might be a focus of a little of this initiative is the study of geographies which are emerging and being designed from new digital media. What I have in mind here is the vast array of internet and stand-alone computer softwares which embody geography in some way in their representation. This is potentially a vast field for all software which is visual in some sense contains spatial relations which when activated and adapted by users and other participants generate new geographies. What I am specifically interested in is the kinds of new geographies which are emerging from serious uses of cyberspace to represent virtual spaces such as cities and various other place-based domains. City-Net has thousands of virtual city sites which are web pages largely given over to advertising their wares through explicit information and links to other places/web sites. I consider that a serious study of these geographies which presumably are constituted quite informally, would be revealing of ways in which the net was constraining representation and the way users were being guided to it. Use and demand would be important here but also important is a sense of how such geographies were designed and what their potential and limits were. For all we know they may be worthless, unusable, at best a diversion, at worst quite distorting. I suspect not but we have no feel for the area.

Associated with this are the many interfaces that are emerging which do represent geography in more considered terms but are constrained by data and software and access. I am thinking here of the move to put visual interfaces on GIS which make them virtual in some sense, linking GIS to CAD and so on inside computers and across the net. In my group at UCL we have a couple of projects which are developing such media for GIS - one called Wired Whitehall is an interface to an urban design for that area being developed by Norman Foster Associates and the kinds of geography being called for by them and their clients are pretty different from those that usually comprise a GIS. Our second project involves linking GIS to urban design and building formal geographies but under a wide array of different geometric representations into a form where designers can manipulate the GIS. These are rather narrowly constrained digital geographies but they are subject to the same kinds of analysis that one might employ in examining say power relations on the internet where structural considerations constrain and emphasize elements of society to the detriment or positive benefit of other elements. I consider that some good case studies of ourselves, as working digital designers in geography are making decisions, are as worthy as those that we might undertake at arms length. Some of these are on our home page noted above.

One last point. The mix of people at this meeting is one which infuses commentators, philosophers and theorists on and of the information society with those who are actively involved in technical development of the very media that one might stand back and comment upon. This is probably a good thing but it is necessary to retain a balance. A good deal of rhetoric has been written, for example about GIS recently, which suggests a set of mindless fools playing with technology while Rome burns. This initiative should be wary of this as I feel there is much to geographies of information that can only come by moving between detailed knowledge of technologies and their limits and the wider social context. I hope this initiative embraces this.

References

M. Batty (1995) The Computable City, at http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/Geo666/batty/melbourne.html

M. Batty (1997) Virtual Geography, at http://www/geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/mike/ 

Michael Batty
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)
University College London
1-19 Torrington Place
London WC1E 6BT, UK

Tel 44 171 391 1781
Fax 44 171 813 2843
email: m.batty@ucl.ac.uk

http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/

Michele Masucci

Interests -

The impact of GIS technology use on planning activities and appropriate development and use of GIS technology for community planning and local environmental management

The role of local NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in local environmental monitoring and community planning

The outlook of NGOs using GIS; that is, learning how NGOs define decision making needs with respect to technology use, including GIS

Geography of the Internet--emerging problems and issues of accessibility related to local environmental quality and community development

Issues -

Understanding how factors that constrain the use of GIS and Internet technologies are interrelated to community empowerment, especially at the community institutional level

Understanding how the advent of a new round of Internet capabilities impacts GIS development and management decisions for low-resource planning and NGO settings

http site (Caution - Site under construction!) http://www.auburn.edu/~masucmm

This site is the www homepage of a research project (Community - University Environmental Analysis Partnerships - UCenP) sponsored by USIA that I co-direct.

The project aims to develop and assess models of inter-institutional linkages for environmental quality monitoring in Alabama and Brazil. Its themes are: 1) to identify critical issues in technology sharing (including development of GIS technology) between universities, NGOs and community planning and, 2) to develop models of appropriate use of technology for improving local environmental quality in both Alabama and Brazil.

Paul Schroeder

Doctoral Student
Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering
University of Maine, Orono

Statement of Interest
Geographies of the Information Society

I see information relations as social relations, and conceive that information-seeking is society-building activity. There are physical aspects to this (as in telecommunications networks, the distribution of daily newspapers, resources in community libraries, etc.) as well as social aspects (as in knowledge-building and sharing social structures). These two aspects ought to be viewed together when defining an "information society."

As a librarian I could say: connecting people to what they need to know, when they need to know it, is fundamental practice for information professionals. Further: an interest in blockages, barriers and obstacles to information reflects my orientation toward public information resources.

This speaking in terms of barriers, blockages and obstacles, however, advances an unwanted notion that information is a kind of object that can be held, transferred, owned, sold and so forth. Pre-workshop documents in part articulate aspects of this tradition: "The possession of information, and the ownership or control of the means to produce, distribute, and consume it ..."

An alternative notion is that information is perpetually created by end users within the contexts of their own questions. Information equity and cycles of information poverty could be related to relative abilities to engage and find voice within the informational / social environment. Access to information resources and the ability to create new knowledge based on these resources ught to be an established right, rather than accepted as a consequence of relative economic advantage.

Spatial technologies, including GIS and remote sensing imagery, have developed within institutional structures that contribute to informational imbalances. One challenge for workshop participants could be to find methods for applying the analytical capacities of these technologies toward discovery of the patterns of their own distribution and use.

Suggested readings on this topic:

Mitchell, William J. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

"The Net is ... profoundly and fundamentally antispatial." (8) "Powerful organizations will seek like ancient despots to bring concentrations of population under their control." (18) "Nolli's famous map of Rome vividly depicted [built space as public / private hierarchy] ... perhaps some electronic cartographer of the future will produce an appropriately nuanced Nolli map of the Net." (131)
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
39 ff., Stone discusses the "hypertrophy of location technologies" and the "warranting of socially apprehensible citizens" who have been created as inhabitants of today's "imaginal territories."
Webster, Frank. "The Information Society: Conceptions and Critique." In, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Vol. 58, Supp. 21, ed. Allen Kent, pp. 74-112. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1996.
Webster asks: is the "information society" fundamentally new, or are we simply looking at increased informatization of social relations that are already well established? (75) He looks at the diffusion of networks as measure of informatization. (88) Overall conclusion regarding spatial aspects: "All things happen in particular places and at specific times, but the characteristics of space and time have been transformed with the advent of the network society." (90)

David Hodge

My interests lie in the connections between information and communications technologies, transportation, and urban form. The rapid development of these technologies makes possible, from a practical point of view, a wide variety of different futures. Perhaps never before have we been so self-aware of the potentially profound impacts of these technologies on society. I am especially interested in understanding the implications of the new technologies for:
  1. the spatial redistribution of activities (all types at all scales),
  2. economic restructuring,
  3. transportation demand, especially intelligent transportation systems and the notion of sustainability, and
  4. sense of community.
These interests were the basis for an OTA study (along with Richard Morrill and Kiril Stanilov) that was published in the November issue of URBAN GEOGRAPHY.

Xavier Lopez

URL: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~xavier/

Statement of interest:

Enormous institutional, legal, and public policy uncertainties confront the creators of digital libraries for geographic information. There is little understanding of the inter organizational issues needed to support the creation, management, dissemination, brokering, and archiving of spatial information in distributed settings. Foremost is the uncertainty regarding the ability of government, non-profit data centers, and research institutes to acquire and share valuable spatial information resources. Flexible legal and policy frameworks are necessary to support the creation of these federated digital libraries spanning more than a single organization -- increasingly common in science, government and industry. Without rigorous and impartial research on the exchange of networked scientific information, future developments in digital libraries and Web-based GIS are likely to be reactive rather than prospective.

Some issues:

Elizabeth K. Burns

The following interests and issues related to the conference topics are part of my on-going research activities in metropolitan Phoenix on urban travel, inner city economic development, and spatial technologies.

Interests:

Issues: