Location-based Services: Discourse of Efficient Spatiality

Contemporary urban mobilization is more and more mediated through various personalized location-based services: from navigation and the ‘nearest best’ to the predictive recommendations “with rich local content that matters the most to you here and now” (Sam Altman, panel at SXSW, March 2010). Location-based services evolved into technologies able to ‘learn’ users’ search and movement histories in order to ‘sense’, customize and recommend preferable experiences for its users, and finally anticipate future spatial movements and encounters in cities. Lead by software and desirable standards, the range of calculative operations is aiming to deliver new ‘meaningful’ spatial experiences for its users by differentiating between ‘normal vs. abnormal’, or in spatial terms desirable vs. undesirable activities in cities. They conform mainstream ideology of efficiency by eliminating chance and unpredictability as unknown and ‘risky’. However, what is more commonly seen as a risk, in spatial terms might as well be a benefit. As the logic of efficient use of space penetrates everydayness with support of calculative technologies, we ought to understand it better in order to re-position the conception of ‘efficient’ in respect to the possible value of unpredictability and chance in urban. The argument is supported with Marcuse’s discussion on ‘actualities’ and 'potentialities’ (in “One-dimensional Man”, 1991) and elaborates dual conception of chance and unpredictable related to spatiality. Predictive sensing based on repetition, previous encounters and familiar, in other words ‘actualities’, significantly limit possibilities for random and chance encounters, in Marcuse’s terms ‘potentialities’.