Paving The Way for Screenless Cities
And Sending A Message.
By Hubert Beroche, Founder of Urban AI
An Unexpected Future
Saturday, February 3, 2024, in Seine-et-Marne (France), the residents of the small village of Seine et Port are preparing to make a historic decision. A decision that charts an unexpected yet familiar future, perhaps forgotten behind our smoke screens. A spontaneous future that, far from those meticulously planned and calculated, could emerge as self-evident. Like a destiny.
A few days earlier, the Mayor of Seine et Port proposed to initiate a referendum to make its village a “smartphone-free Municipality”. This decision follows a collective awareness of screens’ consequences on children's cognitive capacities and, more broadly, this intuition that smartphones are permanently damaging what philosopher Paul Valéry called the “Life of Mind”.
I’m talking about “intuition” because, besides the growing literature that demonstrates the negative effects of screens, we can all feel that something is going wrong with those devices. Sensing in our own body the exhaustion provoked by their extended use. That our mind is like enclosed in those bright rectangles as soon as we rub them [1]. That it’s stealing Lives.
At the urban level, the proliferation of smartphones has also multiple consequences. The most obvious one is the creation of “smombies” - users that are so absorbed by screens that they become blind to their immediate surroundings. In Seoul, which has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates, this phenomenon is so worrying that Public Administrations and research institutes are working on devices and urban installations to prevent accidents between smombies and urban vehicles such as cars.
The growing use of smartphones is also inducing new urban behaviors. This is for example what happens when Google Maps creates new urban centralities in European cities — see image below — or when ride-hailing apps reshape informal spaces in Asia. In both cases, smartphones are reshaping cities from the bottom, almost invisibly, but still in a powerful way. They challenge traditional territorialities, provoking this well-known impression among urban decision-makers of being dispossessed of their city.
It’s maybe for those reasons that on February 3, 2024, 54% of voters responded favorably to the Mayor’s proposal. To regain control of their village. To protect coming generations. To say “Enough”.
One could say that this political decision is ridiculous. First, because it’s legally impossible to forbid smartphone’ use in public spaces in France. But also because in absolute terms, 146 Seine et Port residents voted for this decision. 146 residents, it’s infinitesimal. Even for Seine et Port, it’s few. It’s one-fifth of its population.
However, this referendum remains democratically valid and, more importantly, symbolically here. It marks a new sign in the field of possibilities. Enigmatic like a Hieroglyph, but ready to be deciphered. Ready to announce an unexpected future. Those of Screenless Cities.
Screenless Cities
To explore this future, let’s start by defining what are not Screenless Cities.
Screenless Cities are not “Digital-less” cities. They are not places where human beings would use exclusively pre-industrial or non-industrial technologies. The dissatisfaction generated by hyper-industrial societies has fostered distrust towards all kinds of “advanced technologies”, pushing some communities to become “Low-Tech” — meaning to use as few resources and as simple technologies as possible. To some extent, we can find common ground between Low-Tech communities and Screenless Cities. Both aim to give more agency to people and put technologies at the disposal of societies — instead of the opposite. But “Screenless Cities” doesn’t mean rejecting connectivity, computers, and even AIs as we will see later. And for this very specific reason, it remains a distinct future from the Low-Tech one.
On the other hand, Screenless Cities are not cities full of humans equipped with Augmented Reality (AR) devices. Apple recently released its VisionPro, a headset using spatial intelligence for screenless interactions with information. While technologically impressive, we can already notice that such a device is not for urban life. VisionPro users are unadapted to the messy reality of cities. When immersely navigating into digital spaces, they become unaware of their surroundings, morphing into Smombies 2.0.
Some people have argued that the main inconvenience of VisionPro is its size. But miniaturizing this device will not make it more “urban”. Those technologies are, by design, exacerbating smartphone risks in public spaces — risks that are not only physical but also sensorial and political. They are masking cities with an uninterrupted information flow. This phenomenon highlights a fundamental feature of Screenless Cities: they distribute information in urban spaces instead of concentrating it in the palm of the hand or the iris. Screenless Cities do not streamline a personified flow of information toward individuals but create ambient commons [2].
This remark doesn’t mean that AR technologies are useless. For very specific tasks, those technologies will be highly valuable, especially for urban-related ones such as urban planning and civil engineering. In these domains, easily navigating through data and digital layers improves overall efficiency and facilitates design work. But for city life, which involves very specific activities and skills — mostly unconscious ones, such devices are counterproductive. They mask reality and obliterate conditions under which people can relate and collectively inhabit a city.
Inversely, Screenless Cities physicalize urban data through urban components such as streets, parks, and buildings. They augment cities, and people, by making information embodied, relational, and permanent. One way of doing it is to create what we call, at Urban AI, “sensible interfaces” [3]: screenless and multisensory interfaces to embody data in physical spaces. We are designing and developing sensible interfaces with several Municipalities and AI providers to physicalize their urban data — such as acoustic data, energy data, environmental data,…- in public spaces. Those interfaces are not only distributing information and making urban data legible and usable for people. By doing so, they bring transparency and efficiency to urban systems.
Now that we better see what Screenless Cities are not, we can more easily define them while avoiding common ambiguities. Screenless Cities shift attention from screens to the urban environment. This definition highlights a strategic incentive for urban stakeholders to contribute to such a paradigm. Channeling attention to cities doesn’t only intensify the urban experience, it generates new resources, capacities and revenues for urban players. Death and Life of 21st century Cities will depend on their ability to create policies and technologies to adapt and thrive in the attention economy. It is — and has always been — about “eyes on the street”.
There’s An App For That.
This definition looks quite simple but covers a complex — and complicated — reality. Those who look at today’s urban lives will see that they are massively and growingly relying on screens. We use them to move, eat, buy, socialize, work, and even love. Removing those interfaces imply to rethink in depth the very basic foundations of contemporary cities and, more broadly, societies.
Some thinkers have already stressed our society’s screen dependency. Designer Golden Krishna wrote a book called The Best Interface is No Interface, describing what he calls “Screen-Based Thinking”: the fact that we are mainly considering and manipulating reality through screens. Everything becomes screened, especially the simplest and most innocent moments of our daily lives. As Golden Krishna ironically describes it:
“What’s great about the iPhone is that if you want to check snow conditions on the mountain, there’s an app for that.”
Forget that the National Ski & Snowboard Retailers Association reported that only 2.6 percent of Americans actually downhill ski — or that they did so only about eight days a year when these nothings were first whispered. When we heard that siren song, nothing else mattered. Love and reason? Well, they’re like oil and vinegar.
The commercial continued. Our pulses quickened. “And if you want to check where exactly you parked the car…”
Don’t tease me. We all know how to end that phrase. Six beautiful trademarked words that may have unintentionally fenced in this generation’s limitations on technological creativity.
There’s an app for that
Interestingly enough, this screen dependency is almost invisible at the urban level. We know from city history that technologies have always reshaped urban morphology. Cars have expanded the city. Elevators have raised it. Subways have densified it. Electricity has intensified it.
But what about screens?
The Medium is the Message
Canadian philosopher McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message”. By radically transforming the way people apprehend reality, touch the world, and interact with each other, media change societies and transform psychologies.
“For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan)
Writing created States. Prints brought Protestantism. Press spread European revolutions. Media are introducing new grammar, new languages, new societies, and, ultimately, new worlds.
“We become what we behold” (McLuhan)
But which world are screens introducing? And what types of humans are we becoming by beholding smartphones?
Here, we are easily distracted by what screens display. Taking the content for the message, we are fooled by what screens are about. For example, we often point out social media to elaborate on today's technology failures. We are right in doing so as those platforms need more regulations and better design. But what are social media without screens? Imagine for instance that we had to use street networks and public spaces instead of smartphones to interface with social media. Many of their dysfunctions would be effectively resolved through cities’ innate components — “atmosphere” - because of a fundamental urban principle: cities are owned and made by people.
Standing for a Common Future
At the end of the XIXe century, Nietzsche praised Ancient Greece for being “superficial — from profundity!”. Perhaps once again, there are virtues in superficiality and in considering the medium as the message. To use screens to surface the society they herald.
Maybe once again, we might find some unexpected benefits from considering cities for what they have always been: a medium.
And by doing so, we are also sending a message. We are saying that the future remains open and, above all, a common good.
To explore these questions, we’re launching the Screenless Cities Program. This program will gather worldwide Municipalities and AI providers to move beyond the current screen-centric model and invent new interfaces with urban AIs. If you’re interested and want to join this initiative, feel free to fill out this form or reach out to screenlesscities@urbanai.fr.
References
[1]: This is actually not just an intuition. This phenomenon has been extensively studied and conceptualized by Natasha Dow Schull through her research on the “Machine Zone”.
[2]: Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied, Malcolm McCullough
[3]: Towards Sensible Interfaces, Hubert Beroche
