Representational politics in virtual urban places

EDEN, a famous garden, is also an acronym for the Electronic Democracy European Network, a project involving a consortium of public administrations (local authorities), academic institutions and technology companies. The thirty-month project aims to improve communication between the administrations and citizens in decision-making processes to do with urban planning, and at time of writing is in the transition from `requirements analysis' to implementation of a software toolkit. The EDEN project is concerned, amongst other things, with the mobility of messages to and from urban planning officers in public administrations. Mobility, that is, from people `outside' a city administration to people `inside' it via a website, a virtual place from where messages are to be routed to a correct destination. The planning of virtual urban places is a new concern for both urban planners and systems designers working to implement `information society' initiatives. These two occupations and research fields share similar methodologies, models, and artifacts used to intervene in the practices of their clients. This paper describes how the practices through which planning is made political have been represented in the `requirements analysis' of the EDEN toolkit. The politics of the project do not just lie in its objective, the reconfiguring of `virtual' political geographies in parallel with the `real'. The distinctions made between virtual and real politics are themselves political. Setting aside any essential differences between the two, we will look instead at the politics of representation and representations embedded in the EDEN project and software. DOI:10.1068/a34237 (1) Summary available at http://www.edentool.org. Painter and Philo, 1995; Thrift, 1996). Actor-network approaches (Latour, 1987; Law, 1987; Law and Mol, 2001) provide a vocabulary for describing the mobility of the citizens' `voice in decisionmaking' as it becomes represented in and through the sociotechnical networks of the project. Mostly we will be concerned with the translation of those voices, the new relations between political representation, the online representation of views, and questions of representativeness that are implicated in sustaining EDEN's development. Most of all we will be concerned with the question `where are the politics?' For the purpose of this paper we will use `politics' to mean choices pertaining to the status or influence of people and things. Even with this broad definition, that may seem a strange question to ask of è-democracy', a field that normally grafts political science onto the body of research concerning information, communication, and technology. Politics are easy to find in the literature on `virtual communities' (Rheingold, 1994) and, not least, the `information society' (Noveck, 1999). E-democracy typically harnesses new technology in general and the Internet in particular to political aims that have been usefully reviewed by Bryan et al (1998). However, the politics described in much of the e-democracy literature are located at the end of a trajectory, expressed in terms of broad political aims that are hard to pin down to changes in practice, since practices are rarely described. Unfortunately, few published evaluations give examples of the particular parts played by technology in urban development, or any unintended or paradoxical outcomes relating to the practices that are intended to be supported [Thrift (1996), though see Whyte and Macintosh (2001) for an example relating to `transparency' in public consultation]. The `political' issues we focus on here include some that have been made so far in the project, and some that affect the forthcoming evaluation of the EDEN software toolkit. As we will describe in more detail later, the object of EDEN is to deploy capabilities in computational linguistics, shaped into `natural language processing modules' that provide the building blocks of a software toolkit. The toolkit is to be integrated into the existing technical and social infrastructure sustaining city councils' e-democracy websites and citizens' participation initiatives in five cities. The partners in the project are `users' of the information technology, communications, or planning departments of the city administrations of Antwerp, Bologna, Bremen, Vienna, and a consortium of Polish towns and cities represented by Nisko, and `suppliers', software companies Yana Research and Omega Generation, whose specialities include the field of applied computational linguistics known as natural language processing (NLP), and Public Voice Lab who specialise in research and development of new media in the public sector. Academic partners are the University of Bremen informatics research group TZI, the Osvaldo Piacentini Archive, and the authors, whose prime role in the project is in the stages of `requirements analysis' and `evaluation'. Once tested, deployed on city websites, and successfully evaluated, the software toolkit is meant to address certain technopolitical issues that are commonly used as the basis of e-democracy experiments. The main issue is that citizens everywhere seem disconnected from the administrations that govern them, or participate in the politics of planning decisions only when `options' have already become `facts', owing in part to the remoteness and opacity of decisionmaking and the incomprehensibility of related planning documents. The assumed infrastructure for EDEN is one in which citywide intranets or civic networks seem to offer near ubiquitous access from home, public terminals, and mobile handsets. It is hoped that these provide access for the purposes of making enquiries and having these responded to competently. Improving access, comprehension, and procedural transparency should lead (so the argument goes) to greater participation in planning and acceptance of plans by the `ordinary citizen'. 1608 A Whyte, A Macintosh