2009 Writing Cities Conference Abstracts
April 22-24, 2009 | London, UK
Digging, Sowing, Tending, Harvesting (Bringing the War Home)
Gina Badger (MIT)
This paper follows the cultural and political histories of the words “victory” and “guerilla,” along with a host of other military terms, as they are connected to both state and grassroots initiatives in American cities since WWII. This writing critiques the contemporary use of military metaphors to describe the political work of artists, gardeners, and activists such as Amy Francescini and Richard Reynolds. I will argue that both historical and contemporary victory garden campaigns and the ongoing guerilla gardening movement are ways of “bringing the war home,” a project first made explicit by artist and writer Martha Rosler in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. During the same period, Liz Christy and other neighborhood activists in New York’s Lower East Side instigated the “guerilla” gardening movement, whose name expressed solidarity with America’s official enemies while asserting that it was a militant movement to fight city officials for self-determination. A quarter century earlier, Roosevelt’s government had brought WWII home in a very different way, through its invocation of “victory” as something to be fought for on the mobilized home front of America’s cities. An important part of fighting and winning this total war was the victory garden campaign, the slogans for which included “Every Vegetable a Weapon” and “Our Food is Fighting.” These days, guerilla gardeners like Reynolds still call themselves guerillas, and there are several new victory garden campaigns across the United States, including Francescini’s. These forms of activism, I will argue, are obliquely but fundamentally related to the ways inhabitants of American cities relate to the country’s ongoing overseas military operations. Ultimately, the words used to describe activist movements change how they play out and what can be accomplished through them, and it is time to ask whether political activists, artists and academics really want to bring the war home, or to stop it altogether.
The Internet and the City: blogging and gentrification on New York’s Lower East Side
Lara Belkind (Harvard)
This paper relates the recent rise of weblogs and examines their relationship to processes of urban transformation. Specifically, it looks at the history of Curbed.com, a weblog created in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan that presents a layman’s perspective on real estate development and neighborhood change. Curbed began in 2001 as the personal blog of a local resident documenting the gentrification taking hold on the blocks surrounding his walk-up tenement apartment. It has since become more established, expanding to cover development in other New York neighborhoods and spawning franchises in San Francisco and Los Angeles. This inquiry seeks to examine what influence, if any, Curbed.com has had upon the neighborhood transition it has closely charted. This question is one aspect of larger questions about the relationship between virtual space and urban space; about the impact of growing use of the internet on the city. Has Curbed been a neutral observer of neighborhood change as it professes? By raising awareness of the processes underlying urban transition, has it provided any opportunities for community action to buffer gentrification? Or is the opposite true – have it and other neighborhood blogs contributed to the new desirability and market value of the Lower East Side? I would argue that although Curbed.com has increased the ability of local residents to understand the changes taking place around them, in the end it has helped accelerate gentrification by repositioning a site of local culture within a global market. Although Curbed.com serves an important function in making visible the frequently invisible processes of real estate – creating openings for public discussion, debate, even offering potential for political activism – it is likely enhancing the speed of transition on the Lower East Side due to evolutions in cultural and market operations. For example, post-Fordist differentiation and niche marketing mean that blogs help translate the specific local history of this neighborhood and its bohemian subcultures for a particular sector of global consumers. This in turn opens the neighborhood to broader consumption.
Towards ‘Sustainable Communities’?: community, consultation and the Compulsory Purchase of the site for the 2012 Olympic Games
Juliet Davis (LSE)
This paper focuses on processes of public ‘consultation and engagement’ relating to the development of the Legacy Masterplan Framework (LMF) for the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, envisaged as an entirely new piece of city for London. In accordance with central government planning policy and its own Code of Practice on Consultation, the London Development Agency – the government body responsible for ultimately delivering the LMF – is running an extensive local community participation programme that ties in with processes of developing the LMF to outline planning approval stage, scheduled for late 2009. Speaking to the themes of this workshop, the broad aim of this paper is to illustrate how public consultation in the development of these planning documents provides a context for a number of different conceptions of the city and of urban public life to emerge, and the nature of some of these. As the LMF is still far from materialisation as a concrete piece of city, the analysis considers the media through which a projected and unfolding social and spatial reality are communicated to the public – often visually, by means of charts, diagrams, models and architectural drawings. It also focuses on how contributions or criticisms made by local members of the public – usually verbally, in focussed discussions or question and answer sessions – are recorded, summarised, interpreted and fed back to teams evolving the LMF’s spatial framework. The paper thus addresses questions of how different kinds of information, experience or opinion translate between media, how effectively, and with what significance – processes which the writing of this paper also participates in. It concludes by suggesting how contested understandings of the city and its urban public life are mediated by the masterplan, and considers the influence of the consultation process on aspects of its emergent urban form to date.
Writing an Urban Story from the Walls of a Building: the case of the Post and Telecommunications Palace in Buenos Aires
Cecilia Dinardi (LSE)
The form of a kaleidoscope gives a clear idea of how the architecture of Buenos Aires has shaped its image as a fragmented urban space. French monumental buildings coexist with colonial houses, hi-tech skyscrapers, slums’ precarious architecture, gated communities’ luxurious houses, and shanty-towns cardboard’s constructions. It is not difficult to imagine how different our conceptions of the city might be, and how dissimilar cities our writings might portray, depending upon which material or symbolic aspects we examine: Buenos Aires could be defined as a global cultural city, as one of Latin America’s most dangerous places, as a trendy tourist destination, as the city that never sleeps or as a city inscribed by incessant social and economic crisis, and the list can easily go on. This paper aims to present some reflections upon how a city could be thought of from the perspective of a building, or rather, what a particular building could say about a city’s cultural, political, social and economic settings. By examining a listed monumental building in Buenos Aires’s downtown, the Post and Telecommunications Palace, the intersection of cultural development, urban renewal and historical commemoration is explored, whilst reflecting on the methodological implications underlying this exercise. By doing so, a picture of the city is taken, and a story about the city, written, from the perspective of the building’s origins, its current interventions and future plans.
San Juan from a distance: writing and representing, from near and far
Melissa Fernandez Arrigoitia (LSE)
The case of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s urban development is an interesting one in that it has continually been subject to shifting and mixed allegiances between a ‘Hispanic’ and ‘American’ politico-cultural pasts/presents. Like the debates over its ‘status’, discussions over the ‘autochthonous’ city space are deeply embedded in imaginations of future; or, in the reaffirmation of an unresolved present based on conflicts with the (literally) unsettling colonial past. The symbolic and material uncertainty this complex temporal and spatial scenario implies has produced a chronic display of short-term interventions that have, in turn, constructed an idiosyncratic city space.
Management of poverty and housing, for example, reveals a manic attempt to conceal certain pasts, encourage particular ideas (and material versions) of a prosperous national future, and enforce the cross between those two versions through a present order and discipline. Hinged upon my concern over the representation and discursive constructions of certain city ‘subjects’ through time and with space as a complicit element, my aim in this paper is two-fold: Firstly (without getting into the much-written about criticisms of San Juan’s spatial distribution), I want to think about how writing has served as a powerful medium of imagination and representation of ‘the urban’. To think about San Juan, as a particular kind of city, I will collate and analyze the ideas/politics/intuitions of some artists, novelists, architects, and politicians. This will serve as a broad initial inquiry into what constitutes the intersections between the construction of city space and particular written discourses – and how it may say something about where cities are moving towards, or against. I will then use this material as a point of departure from where to problematize the issue of distance and proximity in writing about cities as both a spatial and temporal one. While one can write ‘from anywhere’, we are encouraged in the social sciences to position ourselves ‘somewhere’. I want to reflect upon the practice of writing about a city (San Juan) from another city (London) by considering the methodological implications of my own location in producing yet another written representation of San Juan. By writing here, now, about there, before, am I precluding a serious discussion about the violence that can result, or be implicit, in remote abstractions? Or, is there something to be said about the way ‘nearness’ and ‘distance’ to (and memory of) certain materials and contexts influences our writing about it? Does my ‘nearness’ and ‘distance’ influence the kind of city I myself imagine and would like to produce? If my ideas about what an ideal city is changes with my own location and time, can and should those divergences be represented in my writing? In a sense, this is a statement about the ever-shifting nature of place- celebrating the fact that writing, as one of many forms of expression, can never capture it all. But it is also about recognizing, methodologically speaking, how inquiring about location and the practice of writing- together- may yield more honest and perhaps political alternatives to our own and cities’ pasts, presents and futures.
Skylines and the “whole” city
Gunter Gassner (LSE)
For the Second Writing Cities Workshop: How do views shape words, how do words shape cities? I propose to reflect on views in a literal sense. I want to focus on distant views and in particular on skylines and how they produce knowledge about and for the “whole” city. This study will relate to my PhD thesis on Professional Skyline Discourses. Skylines, in their most common present day meaning, are defined as the outline of the city seen against the sky and also as the representation of this in painting or another art (see Oxford English Dictionary). Following the way the term is used in current planning policies, such as the London Plan (2004) and the London View Management Framework (2007), skylines refer to the act of observing the city from a distant, low and publicly accessible viewing place. These definitions not only put forward the idea that buildings compete with each other in terms of their height, but also that skylines have collective dimensions. As city-wide features, they suggest having something to do with the “whole” city. They indicate to be relevant for and represent the entire city and provide a superior spatial understanding of the city as a single entity. Additionally, they aim to provide an aesthetic experience and knowledge all citizens and visitors have access to. In this paper I want to reflect on the relationship between skylines and the “whole” city by contrasting two distant views. In both the City of London is observed from the south bank. However, while one is a protected view, as defined in the London View Management Framework, the other is not mentioned in any planning guidance. This study will include aspects related to the different viewpoints, views and the relationships between the viewpoints and the views. In so doing, I aim to contribute to a more critical and advanced understanding of skylines, which are frequently used by professionals, such as policy makers and architects, as a device to control the built environment.
Demolishing Public Housing for the Good of New Orleans: culture and conflict among housing advocates over the future of the city
Leigh Graham (MIT)
Hurricane Katrina displaced thousands of poor African-American New Orleanians and spurred a network of community development elites to fight for their recovery. This ethnography examines how culture patterned their political strategies of action around public housing development – namely the planned demolition of 4,500 public housing units and their replacement with mixed-income properties. This analysis of an ethnically, geographically and generationally diverse network is grounded in listening to them talk, observing their interactions, and assessing our written proposals for public housing redevelopment. I focus on how our articulated ideas of the urban poor’s right to the city ultimately shape who decides what is built, where and for whom. The “projects” are one of the foremost public symbols of urban poverty. Predominately nonwhite, as a shelter of last resort they concretize economic and ethno-racial inequality. Poverty de-concentration policies are technically race neutral yet have explicit implications for poor communities of color. This “color-blind” rhetoric versus racialized reality engenders elite conflict over how to house the urban poor and make cities attractive, safe places to live. Embedded in these challenges are cultural assumptions over the types of housing poor people should have and to whom the city really belongs. New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the U.S. with one of the highest concentrations of public housing. I detected a deeper struggle among elites for power to shape the city’s future that overlapped with cultural cleavages in the network. Despite a philosophical consensus that the poor deserve to come home, entrenched disagreement existed over the right of the poor to participate in site and city planning and redevelopment; the legitimacy of the developments as appropriate low income housing; and the impact of public housing on the city’s overall health and prospects for recovery.
Beyond Use: alternative approaches to urban infrastructure
Tad Hirsch (MIT), Susanne Seitinger (MIT)
The Oxford English Dictionary defines infrastructure as “a collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking” or the “substructure, foundation”. Urban infrastructure is generally described as submerged technology that provides the material and physical substrate creating and connecting different spaces of production and living. It is rarely seen as a site of action or reflection; while infrastructure planning may be contentious, once in place systems quickly disappear from view. In this paper, we complicate this conception by highlighting several cases in which infrastructure is “surfaced.” We do not focus on these moments in connection with ruptures or catastrophes nor do we move towards an all-encompassing vision of infrastructure. Instead, we examine ways in which grassroots actors actively engage with infrastructure by appropriating, reconfiguring and building systems according to specific requirements under shifting sociopolitical and cultural conditions. Taking a practice-oriented approach, we emphasize the diversity of infrastructure production and its producers. In the first part of this essay, we describe our approach to urban infrastructure and explain how it contributes to a burgeoning interdisciplinary dialogue. In the second part, we focus on the bottom-up appropriation and production of urban infrastructures. We describe activists designing and building custom communications systems, artists transforming building facades into platforms for creative expression, and DIY (do-it-yourself) enthusiasts interfacing their own energy harvesting technologies with the grid. Through these examples, we present an image of the city as a vibrant and dynamic place whose material underpinnings are continuously transformed through the interplay of social and material aspects of urban life.
“The bottoms” as the colloquial language of American city form
Steven Moga (MIT)
In the colloquial language of American city form, “the bottoms” once meant both alluvial land and the place where poor people live. Low-lying, poorly drained, and flood-prone, these city districts were often adjacent to hilltop neighborhoods like “Quality Hill” or “The Heights.” In my dissertation in urban planning at MIT, I argue that the historic presence of low-income immigrants and African American residents in these urban districts resulted not from residential choice, nor the sifting and sorting processes described by some urban theorists, but rather as a consequence of what Lewis Mumford pointedly referred to as “natural zoning” (The City in History, 1961: 460). Barred from middle and upper class districts of the city, low income immigrants and African Americans settled downstream from mills, slaughterhouses, and tanneries or along the railroad tracks at the river’s edge. While there were important exceptions, and notable inversions such as “Poverty Hill,” for the most part, in the industrial era, city slang expressed social hierarchy, landscape character, and topography in one. Dozens of districts with names like Black Bottom, Russian Bottom, West Bottoms, Buttermilk Bottom, and Foggy Bottom once defined the local American urban landscape. Urban renewal remade many of these “bottoms,” and many were renamed. But, in a few places, the name stuck. I have documented multiple examples of “bottoms” in American cities, and I’d be interested in participating in the Writing Cities Workshop in order to discuss and explore further the connections between city views (up and down), city language, and the changing city landscape.
Metonyms for a dictatorship: cities under Franco
Olivia Muñoz-Rojas-Oscarsson (LSE)
In this paper I explore my writing on post-war urban reconstruction in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War from the point of view of the concept of the city that underlies it as well as the aim and mode of my writing. I suggest that my use of three selected sites in Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid to examine broader urban, political and ideological transformations under the Franco regime proposes a metonymical concept of the city, whereby specific sites become illustrative of what is happening to the whole (the city and the nation). Although I spend a significant amount of words describing specific urban changes—which have not necessarily been researched before, and thus deserve scholarly attention—my aim is purportedly critical: I seek to reveal the political and symbolic continuities and discontinuities that underpinned decisions on urban reconstruction and planning in Spain in the post-war years. Such continuities and discontinuities, I argue, are reflective of the broader ideological and political inconsistencies of the Franco regime despite its image of unity and domination. By focusing on the dictatorship’s official discourses on post-war planning and architecture as they appear in administrative, technical and press documentation, including photographs and plans, relating to the three selected sites—I am deliberately emphasising the top-down approach to the city that characterised the writing on cities in the authoritarian and hierarchical context of the dictatorship. Such a mode of enquiry rests on the assumption that the inherently contradictory nature of the regime emerges from these official writings, and that it is not necessary to contrast these writings with alternative discourses on the city in order to deconstruct them critically.
Semantic Anxiety: The Mughal Pavilion and historic conservation in Delhi
Laura Lee Schmidt (MIT), Ninad Pandit (MIT)
A photograph of South East Delhi, shot in 1866 from the top of Humayun’s Tomb, records the Mughal fossils that now lie hidden below and within this busy corridor of the city. Sunder Nursery is a large government nursery located within this funerary landscape. Established in the 1920s to develop plant species for the landscaping of New Delhi, Sunder Nursery is now controlled by the Archaeological Survey of India due to its proximity to a large number of prominent Mughal tombs, as well as the four structures of archaeological import located within it. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) is currently leading restoration work in the larger historic precinct, which includes Humayun’s Tomb, a World Heritage site. One of the four historic structures within Sunder Nursery that is being restored dates back to at least the 16th Century, and was once a tomb of approximately 10 X 10m. Recently re-plastered and re-painted, its architectural details – the original patterns for which were lost – have been replaced by simplified and incongruous caricatures. As part of the AKTC plan for conservation, the structure, which in its Mughal days, was a tomb, has been restored into a secular “pavilion” by parties involved in the project.
What will soon be known as the “Mughal Pavilion” to the visitors of Sunder Nursery — which has been declared a “central park” for New Delhi — has undergone a change of both identity as well as historical meaning; what was once a tomb is henceforth, typologically and historically speaking, a pavilion. In this paper, we examine what impact conservation has on a reading of the city of Delhi. The Mughal Pavilion manifests an anxiety about the historical semantics of the conserved city as it lends new meaning at multiple scales. As a structure, it reassesses the typological role that structures play in a constructed locality. As a locality of meaning, it invokes the transhistorical character of the conservation process – the capacity for conservation to naturalize objects across time periods and project them simultaneously on a single contemporary picture plane. By textually locating the Mughal Pavilion, we argue that conservation practices surrounding the structure reconstitute the discursive identity of the city in which it stands. In a fast developing city as Delhi, historic conservation is a vehicle for re-imagining urban typologies, as it capacitates the reframing of the meaning of its historic structures. Conservation is a process of redefinition, not merely preserving meaning. In this respect its textual nature means that, for the writing of the city, the Mughal Pavilion represents a critical a moment for reassessing the mode in which we communicate about contemporary cities.
The canal in the ‘City of Gardens’: an historic and projective examination of an infrastructural artery
Nida Rehman (MIT)
This paper explores the past and speculates on the future of the Lahore Canal. An irrigation channel built under British rule, the canal inadvertently became the central lifeline of the city. Underpinning this writing is the hypothesis that an examination of this vast 19th Century network of perennial irrigation canals along the Indus river system and the concurrent development of Lahore exposes a previously unstudied relationship between city and country: one that straddles the physical and the imaginative realm. I propose that regional transformations were catalytic to urban transformations. Over time, the canal waters siphoned from the River Ravi, Lahore’s primordial lifeline, nurtured an extensive colonial garden landscape that has become the center of the contemporary city, relegating the river and the medieval core to the periphery. The changes to the material environment are accompanied by a host of ideas about nature servicing a ‘civilized’ lifestyle, encapsulated in the emergence of an urban theme: Lahore as a ‘City of Gardens’1. The words garden and infrastructure both connote an act of transforming nature through and in the service of human enterprise. They share a capacity to express the power of culture over nature through the wilful manipulation of natural elements: water, land, energy. Being characterized as a ‘City of Gardens’, Lahore has self-consciously cultivated an image that acknowledges the act of metabolizing nature in the service of improvement. This image of the city has tacitly lent a façade of historic authenticity to contemporary planning ideas. This paper interrogates this identity as a unifying narrative, posits it as a fragmentary concept with shifting historical meanings and evaluates its design relevance to the topical notions of landscape urbanism within the South Asian context. In doing so I articulate some contemporary challenges in the city and how they might be re framed by understanding the paradoxical but symbiotic relationships in Lahore’s history: between city and county, nature and artifice, tradition and modernity.
Political Battles: images between built environment and biosphere
Torsten Schröder (LSE)
Today the visual practices provide us with the most powerful, partially undisputed representations about realities, trigger most passions and provide an incredible laboratory to explore representations. The question of representation becomes instantly politically, but we still don’t know how to unpack images. The relationship between the built environment and the biosphere is societal mediated amongst others by various constructed images. By image I mean any sign, any work of art, inscription, or picture that interacts as a mediation to access something else. These images form a contradictory puzzle. The choice between artificiality and authenticity, visibility and invisibility, the made-up world and the real world, right and wrong is doomed to failure. But it’s not about resolving this puzzle, rather to experiment with ways of writing about images. On a limited set of images, which envision specific urban formations of possible less-destructive futures, I aim to systematically interrogate this cascade of images, to attempt to analyse them in relation to each other by employing following themes: From the invisible hand engineering a particular image, to reformulations of the paradigmatic codes of connections between nature, building technology, usage and design, to scales of endangerment and possible solutions, to the invisible disclosed world. We still do not know what images are, but they are quick …
Competing conceptualisations of the university-city relationship
David Seligman & EB Kelly (Harvard)
Urban universities are simultaneously acclaimed for the revenue and jobs they create (particularly because most universities stayed in cities when other institutions fled) and derided for the role they play as a “gentrifying” force in urban neighborhoods. This paper examines the complicated relationship between the city and the university by focusing on two universities that have recently sought to expand into underserved urban neighborhoods: Columbia University in New York City, and Harvard University in Allston. The paper examines how these expansions have impacted the universities’ relationships with their cities and with their neighborhoods and seeks to show how these examples illustrate the tension between competing conceptualizations of the university-city relationship. For example, the university is seen as both sui generis, and above place, while simultaneously deeply bound up in its location. It is both a private institution and immensely public. These different conceptualizations have animated the political discourse surrounding both the Harvard and Columbia expansions. The paper will also look toward these examples in order to question whether the university’s powers should be expanded to include broader grants of authority akin to those of their local government or whether the risks associated with over-empowering universities, which at their core are fundamentally corporations with boards and private endowments, outweigh the benefits of giving universities greater powers.
Mapping Main Street: tracing an American political mythology, urban imaginary and built environment
Jesse Shapins (Harvard)
This paper presents a preliminary excavation of the history and contemporary condition of Main Street as political mythology, urban imaginary and built environment. Since the publication of Sinclair Lewis’s book Main Street in 1920, Main Street has been a highly contested, shifting metaphor for what constitutes traditional American values and the “average” American experience and place. Since the Great Depression through today, Main Street has been deployed by the left as a form of populist revolt against Wall Street’s monied interests. On the right, Main Street has been a tool for provoking anger at a perceived elitism of Washington politicians and a wedge for instigating the culture wars. The urban imaginary of Main Street evokes the 19th century small town center, the image commodified by Walt Disney as Main Street, USA. However, the term’s urban history ranges as far back 17th century New England villages and Spanish presidios and missions. And today, Main Street is a national movement for historic preservation and the revitalization of decaying downtowns, as a well as an aesthetic moniker for New Urbanist design and exclusive lifestyle center developments. The built environment of Main Street, constituted by the physical forms that dot its thousands of miles of streets and the everyday practices of its millions of inhabitants, tells a story that constantly complexifies its political mythology and urban imaginary. There are Main Streets in every city throughout the country. Not just historic downtowns, Main Streets are suburban cul‐de‐sacs, blocks of the 1950s strip malls, the food courts on America’s military bases throughout the world and many other forms of social space. Read together, these corridors of commerce and community present a highly variegated picture of America’s past, present and future cultural, political and urban history.
Reconciling Critical Social Theory with Zen Buddhist principles and practice
Lily Song (MIT)
The objective of this paper is to reconcile Critical Social Theory with Zen Buddhist principles and practice in order to formulate how the planning discipline may help a society’s agents to engage in the critical reflection and political action necessary to overturn false ideologies (i.e. beliefs, values, attitudes, etc. that legitimate oppressive social practices and institutions) and realize a more just and fulfilling presence in the city. Critical Social Theory as conceptualized by the Frankfurt School provides an instructive lens to understand the circular process by which: (a) a society’s agents consciously and unconsciously subscribe to beliefs, values, attitudes, etc. that color their perceptions of the city, (b) such perceptions are subsequently manifested in writings and produced knowledge about the city, (c) such scholarship in turn impacts how the society’s agents act (or fail to act) upon the city (i.e. public policy), (d) these actions reproduce certain social and spatial configurations of the city, and (e) the resulting social and spatial arrangement inculcates agents with the beliefs, values, attitudes, etc. that color their perceptions of the city, so that the cycle repeats itself again. The deconstructionist project of Critical Social Theory has perhaps enjoyed more success relative to its twin goal of re-construction. In other words, Critical Social Theory has better interrogated the source and logic of collective suffering and restriction of human possibilities within various societies than it has helped re-construct a set of true beliefs, rational preferences, and real interests for agents to ultimately achieve a final state of “real liberation” through organized political action. This paper argues that Zen Buddhist principles of impermanence, suffering, presence, and wholeness, along with the practice of mindful living within the platform of the city, can help guide realization of the re-constructionist project of Critical Social Theory. The relevance of the Zen Buddhist principles and practice across culture and context, coupled with certain universal and timeless attributes of the city resolves internal conflicts that in the past compromised the re-constructive capacity of Critical Social Theory and, in doing so, helps the discipline of planning move closer towards realizing the good city.
Sensor Narratives
Orkan Telhan (MIT)
As sensing and recording information about the urban infrastructures of the city is becoming ubiquitous practice, we witness an emerging era of representations and information models that form the basis of new narratives of the city. Real-time noise, air/water pollution, and energy consumption maps, produced either by individuals, institutions or goverments, are becoming common knowledge that bring new kinds and levels of awareness about cities. Like all narratives, on the other hand, these representations bring their political and social consequences and not only provide alternative views to inform the experience of the lived environment, but also become tools that allow their producers to construct arguments, which can directly shape the public opinion. In fact, today, it is possible to capture sulphur dioxide levels in different neighborhoods of Ankara in real-time with mobile sensors and overlay them on a map that shows the boot-leg coal distribution facilitated by the city officials and prepare the ground to make speculative arguments about a political party’s intentions behind investing underdeveloped neighborhoods in a city to earn extra votes before the coming election. In this paper, I would like to articulate on the politics of representation that is emerging from such practices. Being both a designer and user of such systems, I will present arguments on the implications of sensing, recording and representation systems and discuss the way they establish new norms and values about cities. From cities that experience data-faciliated segregation due to their less-desirable zones rendered by sensors, to citizen-science, grassroots knowledge that help inhabitants fight against corporate politics, I will address a variety of scenarios how data, information, its real-time and archival representation transform the way we construct sensor narratives and shape our experiences of the cities of today and near future.