On urban trajectology: algorithmic mobilities and atmocultural navigation. Issue 1 (2nd January 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brighenti, Andrea Mubi; Pavoni, Andrea
• Is Part Of: Distinktion. Volume 24:Issue 1(2023)
• Page Start: 40
• Page End: 63
• Publication Date: 2023-01-02
• Subjects: Spatial perception -- urban mobility -- new media -- hodology -- urban navigation -- urban atmospheres -- atmoculture; Social sciences -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Social history -- Periodicals; 300
• DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2020.1861044
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1600-910X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this piece, we introduce the notion of 'atmoculture' as a conceptual tool to analyse the new forms of mobility supported and enacted by digital algorithms. In historical perspective, we analyse how modernity has created a movement-space where the problem of finding one's way through an increasingly 'displaced' urban space first emerged, with noticeable psycho-social consequences. Reconstructing the new digital media as a continuation of this spatial imagination, we seek to zoom in on the forms of mobility facilitated by digital algorithms. Urban digital navigation, we suggest, proceeds in parallel with a reorientation of the urban experience towards atmospheric considerations, maximizing safety and pleasure in the user's encounters with the environment. In this context, atmoculture appears a spatial-aesthetic, psycho-cultural, and bio-technological milieu that prepares space for convenient navigation. We discuss a number of consequences: first the disburdening effect, whereby subjects delegate to a number of perceptions and decisions to algorithms, expropriating the natural problem-solving aspect of subjectivity; second, the invisible transformations of urban space due to the biases that are built in algorithms themselves; third, the tensional, even contradictory outcomes of atmocultural expectations, whereby the goal of a secure and pleasant environmental interaction is undone by the very quantity of information provided and the level of alertness required from the user.