Epilogue: Seoul Libre Maps
I like to go cycling. It was 3rd grade when I finally could ride a bike without training wheels and from high school. Since then, I’ve ridden my bike for a commute. But especially, it was a blessing when I started to ride a road racing bike. It made me realize tough feeling through exercise can give new kinds of satisfaction. So I had been traveling all around Korean peninsula, got serious accidents, and after I got to the US, every week of summer I traveled around small towns in Massachusetts and let my cycling friend know the excellence of Korean red bean jelly bar as an energy bar.
One of my personal but special experiences on the saddle is the time when I succeed to break the 10-minute record of Mt. Bukak. I remember when I first climb the Mt. Bukak; it was so painful that my heart was about to pop out and I felt my muscle inside, around the heart, was strained. It can be possible because, I ride a bike as fitness, based on the data comes from numerous sensors on the bike, as I interviewed with bicycle bookazine <Bicycle Print #03: Custom Culture>.
Obscure values such as “endless efforts and self-improvement” could be realized through technologies like heartbeat sensor, Strava’s segment functionality, GPS and cadence sensor, and power meters. Through that, my body is truly improvable. For instance, if there were no segment functionality in Strava, there would not be “records” in the mountain, and it would work for me to be remembered just one tough mountain. Moreover, it would not be possible to devise strategies of sprinting in the middle of climbing unless there were no sensors attached to the bike and me. I have to say the thought that individuals will be able to use data to set more accurate goals and make the right decisions comes from my bike experiences. Although the final goal that “I want to climb the mountain in less than 10 minutes” looks meaningless, for me, it was a meaningful challenge in that it was an experience of setting a self-determined aim and realizing it based on data.
The other special memory through bicycle was the field drawing experience when I was producing “Landlord: on the top of Our Lord,” which aims to visualize the changing speed of popular streets, thereby depicting how fast gentrification has been processed.
In fact, cycling computers or smartphones make possible to draw something on a city scale, and some users on Strava has tried to draw a cat or a giraffe.
Compared to satellite imagery tracing, ground-truth-ing the roads and building one by one is meaningful in a sense that I could experience the moment of when immaterial data meets physical, urban space. Using this data, we could add the buildings including address, and roads into OpenStreetMap and produce this visualization:
The reason why I did this burdensome process is that there was no way to get the building outline data in Seoul. I thought that it is the most effective way to visualize the building itself to show the changing speed at popular streets in Seoul. However, in 2012, the South Korean government had yet established National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), and all digital map providers did not support custom building styling feature — still, they do not support custom styles. The only way to be able to do this is using OpenStreetMap. However, in 2012, there was almost nothing in there in Seoul. Therefore, I don’t have any choice but to draw everything on the map.
This is a result of all of those efforts: after that, it is interesting to see the changes around the Hongdae, Samchung Dong, and Seocheon Area in OSM after we contributed the data. For instance, after we added the building data, there has been continuous contributions around the peripheral area of Hapjeong and Mangwon area, so now we indeed can produce a “Hongdae map” only using OSM data. It could not be possible until these days.
Observing my contribution have evolved on OSM, and how data has been interacting with urban space, in this case in Seoul, I thought it could be a powerful example of how we could establish the feedback loop of data to urban space, abstraction to action and participation, and numbers to debate. In particular, open data movement could foster self-determined production culture for citizens, and at the same time, citizens could benefit from the process and the result.
And that experience is the powerful motivation of why we start <Seoul Libre Maps>.
Smart (mayor’s) City?
Like attaching sensors on a bike and a heartbeat sensor on human’s body to achieve a goal that breaks the 10-minute record, Smart City is similar to attaching a cycling computer in cities. Since IBM declared in 2008 that it would provide solutions for Smart City, many new or redeveloping cities have joined the flow. In Rio de Janeiro, this system was competitively attracted for hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. In Korea, Songdo International City actively applied the notion of Smart City from the initial phase. However, the Smart City of Rio de Janeiro had a very convenient management system for the city, but it seems to be a completely closed system for citizens. “A control room that looks straight out of NASA” may reveal problems of when city council owns the information that comes from sensors exclusively. In an interview, Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio, was very proud of the city’s ability and potential of the system, such as reacting very quickly to individual crimes and evacuating residents in times of natural disasters such as floods. Of course, it makes no sense to criticize these features bringing benefits to citizens. However, it is very top-down in that the gathered data is analyzed and decisions made through the results are delivered to citizens in one direction.
Smart City’s command center, where everything is integrated, may accomplish its purpose well. However, the thing is that there are various problems that have many purposes and perspectives. This is analogous with a professional cyclist with a sensor attached has to ride for the team under the direction of the coach. The cyclist must adjust their pace so that they cannot exceed more than 160 of their heartbeats and should act as a windbreaker for the leader of the team; It is an environment where an individual cannot act according to the one’s will. They cannot go out alone to conquer mountains leaving the designated leader of the team, or enjoy the scenery by taking into other roads.
It is far from the direction to pursue in a society recognizing various values and differences such as diversity and inclusiveness that the data of environment and life of the city is used only as a reference for a few decision makers. The story of who owns and analyzes data in Smart City is somewhat similar to David Weinberger’s interview on who decide mass production on the creative industry, in a digital DIY documentary <Press, Pause, Play>.
“In the creative world, it used to be that we knew where to go to get art, where to go to get entertainment. […] But of course, there’s a price, […] in which somebody else is making decisions. And they’re also human being, so they have very limited range of taste, opinions and ideas. Traditionally, unfortunately typically, it’s been a representative of particular self-empowered groups, […] as I say, typically white guys. They tell us what’s gonna go into the museum and a front page of the newspaper.”
Likewise, since government decision makers, no matter how much they work for the public, are very few compared to the citizens as a whole, the government has a very limited range of tastes and opinions and cannot adequately reflect the stories of citizens. Also, citizens are now in a position to speak their story at a relatively low cost due to the open-sourced technology, so there is no reason not to tackle and touch data of Smart City directly.
Civic Data Movement, and time passed
Contrary to the top-down approach that Smart City obtain, Civic Data or Civic Tech Movement, which uses data for their purposes to meet the various needs and objectives of citizens, has been regarded as an alternative approach. It means that citizens could make changes in cities and country through data.
A movement that “create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities and our country” (National Day of Civic Hacking Website, 2013) have provided new possibilities in a sense that citizens can solve problems that governments could not solve because of the resource they have. Online-311 services such as FixMyStreet (2007) and SeeClickFix (2009) had been introduced as a successful case and Code for America had been founded around 2009 in such positive circumstances. In Korea, Codenamu, Code for Seoul, and Code for Incheon founded through Brigade, a local initiative of Code For America and many civic data projects have been produced and published.
Since then, Civic Tech has advanced regarding both the amount of funding and the scale of business by forming diverse clusters. According to a survey <The Emergency of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field> from Knight Foundation at 2013, Civic Tech field had been growing centered on two clusters: open government and community action. It evolved into data transparency, visualization and mapping, public decision making, crowdfunding, and P2P sharing system and grew more than 23% from 2008 to 2012.
Because of the energy, I regarded these to 21st-century civic movement when these projects first appeared in the world. In particular, the concept of FixMyStreet that “We report our city’s problem” well matched with active citizen that could handle technology well and it is heavily related to the DIY (Do It Yourself) City movement that Sarah Williams mentioned about that in her article <The Responsive City: The City of the Future Re-Imagined from the Bottom-Up>. Open-sourced technology and open data enable us to do this kind of production activities at significantly low cost; thereby cities could be understood and changed by citizens through data.
However, over the years, I have come to think of these projects in a somewhat different way, and in particular, Sarah Williams pointed out in the last paragraph of <The Responsive City> that there is some doubt as well as hope for the civic data movement.
“Most importantly the bottom-up city helps us to steer away from government control and surveillance and create a partnership for analyzing the prodigious amounts of information we now collect about almost everything. While the bottom-up city has been effective for creating new technologies in cities, the question we should ask is, “Can it persist?” as it is highly dependent the good will those citizens involved.”
For instance, some web-based civic data projects which were published around 2010 are not maintained in these days, or many of the Code for America’s Github repository does not have any manuals. There is only one project that has been managed in 8 projects that had been done at 2011 in Code For America Boston. Although almost all of the projects have repository on Github, old projects did not have any updates since 2010–11. We need to think about how we develop meaningful but yet done projects that came out from civic Hackathon, how we persist our goodwill, and how we maintain the real change through the goodwill.
Changes by Citizens
What change can these movements bring to cities? How will the citizen-led change be made? And most importantly, what goals should we continue with this movement? Lawrence Lessig introduced the four forces that regulate individual behavior as laws, norms, markets, and (technological) architecture. This “A Pathetic Dot Theory” got popular when Lessig uses it to describe how the regulation works in cyberspace, since “code”, which is the internet’s architecture, could control everything beyond limitations such as laws of physics, biology, or social and cultural forces. The difference of circumstances when Lessig theorized the theory is that code is influential to cities beyond cyberspace, as cities become machine-readable.
In this regard, Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, discusses what sort of citizen-led change should be, and used Lessig’s theory to what “Civic Media” means.
“[…]One of the first things that we try to do is unpack civic from just being about passing laws. only a bill model of civics, where we elect representatives, you know, legislation goes into the house, it goes through committee, it passes. And your role as a citizen is to watch the process and occasionally sort of comment and chip in. I think a lot of people don’t feel like that’s a particularly effective way that they as individuals can make change these days. So I’m interested in a definition of civic that could involve everything from trying to influence laws, to trying to make change through markets, through new code and new technologies and through social norms.”
“That change may not be about electing someone to Congress. That change maybe more about understanding what’s going on with rooftop solar energy and why converting your house, um, so that you’re no longer using a coal-fired power plant, that might be a massive civic step that you could take. […]”
Zuckerman sees Lessig’s regulatory theory as the driving force of “social change,” and he thinks the key is to induce the change in a way that citizens could make a direct impact on each regulatory sector. In particular, he focuses on changes in norms, which is more about the change of people’s thinking than the change caused by legal amendment through legislation. For example, he argues that racial or immigrant hatred is a problem already solved by law, and that police violence by racial discrimination can lead to genuine change through norms. Or on architecture sector, he asserted that we could make change by devising a cryptographic messaging system to be secured in surveillance networks as WhatsApp does for us. This is different to the fact that in Lessig’s theory he introduced how law, which could be most compulsory means among them, can changes norms, markets, and architecture, and it would be effective in that we all are not congressperson; therefore, it is limited to change through amendment of legislation. He argues that individual goals like “installing a solar panel on the roof” and practice for aiming the goals could make a more direct change. This may be a significant indication that not only big changes in the Civic data or Civic Tech, but also individual but meaningful changes could work.
Self-Determined Production Culture and Libre Map Making
Seoul Libre Maps deals with maps as commons, which could be acquired in Seoul. Maps shape our understanding of the world by mediating space; at the same time, they are a field of the complex interaction among capital-, state-, and civil control and decision making. In a situation where we consider maps as a Google-map-ish digital app, if citizens can begin their own story through the map and by-products of the production process — produced data and know-how — are appropriately shared, we thought that we could expect a change in awareness about maps as commons.
These reflections may be more meaningful in the space of Seoul, since the complexity of the Korean internet environment and the geopolitical environment, it is neglected in the open mapping environment although Seoul is a global metropolitan city. When all of Seoul’s OSM data is sorted in chronological order, the data before 2013 is only filled with roads. As Hanbyul Jo mentioned in her article <Views on Digital Maps and Open Data>, If Pokemon Go had not ignited OSM contribution to South Korea, it might have been even worse.
Through “Libre Map Making” that Seoul Libre Maps workshop exemplified, I think I want workshop participants to experience what I feel when I experienced with a bicycle — gradual improvement of oneself, and understanding physical space based on data — in a context of Seoul and Civic Data Movement. The change through these making movements could be possible in various sectors: We could increase data accessibility by sharing data generated during map production; New open source project could emerge and thereby organize a whole new ecosystem about online map; The maps created by citizens could speak from their interest to awareness of problems in cities. Therefore, it will be possible for citizens to start debating about the city easily through Libre Map Making, which will contribute to the changes of norms.
On the other hand, we wanted artists’ to tell their unique stories, and thereby revealing diversity, which is one of the most important values that we consider in the project. In <Uninformation Mapping & Video>, we could see participants’ unique views and Seoul’s localities through the collected rough maps, such as “A Coding Park” in Eunpyong-gu or “A street that I’m robbed of my money.” in <Read/Write Offline Mapping>, it was a great pleasure to watch the moment when maps of workshop participants’ individual needs were drawn. For instance, it was encouraged for participants to set a map’s topics more personal, like “My Vegan Experience” or “Connecting the dots: Triangles of Each Life” — Dan Phiffer mentioned it as “which aspects of our lived urban experience might not be reflected in the familiar utilitarian smartphone maps designed to move us efficiently through the city”. In <Cheonggyecheon, Dongdaemun Gentrification>, Listen to the City exemplified the diversity of documenting history by presenting the mental maps of street vendors and a poverty activist whose memories were easy to be forgotten in the majority of histories. Therefore, each workshop has unique characteristic; on the one hand, we were laughing all the time in the workshop planning meeting, on the other hand, we were sincerely serious. Technically, one workshop is highly tech-driven where we use open-source GIS tools and produce custom tile-servers, on the others we went out for drawing a map with pencils and papers.
What we wanted to tell, via this project, might be the slide image that Dan Phiffer used for his introductory presentation. “Better than Yesterday”, which seems to acknowledge the difficulties and limitations of open source projects and related imperfection, would be the attitude for us who try to find alternatives using open source technology. Gradually improving, our self-determined activities may accomplish social changes, as I broke the ten-minute record at climbing Mt. Bukak despite my heart was about to pop out. Of course, we may have in trouble such as server fault, participants’ contributed maps are not displayed (Uninformation Mapping & Video), maps cannot be printed, data is wiped out (Read/Write Offline Mapping), Suffered from the summer heat in the field trip (Cheonggye-Cheon, Dongdaemun Gentrification).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But still, if we could be better than yesterday, (break the 10-minute record), we should do what we can do. (or pedal.)
