Thank you to Riem, I came across this article by Anthony D'Andrea in the Mobilities Journal: Neo-nomadism: A Theory of Post-Identitarian Mobility in the Global Age.

Simultaneous thinking or not, it is good and flattering to see that I have fostered a field of inquiry on its own, and that the neo-nomad wording/thinking spreads, though I mainly speak about psycho-socio-cultural aspects and spaces. I look forward to read this article.

As I wrote in a reply to Bill Thompson after discovering his BBC article, In Search of the Neo-nomad, I have been working on the neo-nomad since the time I was enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1999. The title of my MIT thesis (MIT, 2001) is Embodiment: Mental and Physical Geographies of the Neo-nomad. Since, I wrote many articles about neo-nomads, some for Ubicomp conferences… I also graduated from Harvard with a Doctor of Design, which title is: Neo-nomads: Designing Environments for Living in the Age of Physical, Digital and Mental Mobilities (Harvard, 2006). I opened my research blog much later in 2005… Thanks to Jerôme Chevillat and Roger of Kaywa, my words have spread to the point of peaking to 722 visits a day for the month of June 2007!

My book, Neo-nomads, is coming soon... patience!

Anyway readers, for your information, here is a list of relevant publications, interviews and talks I gave around the world on neo-nomads:

Forthcoming publication “Environnements néo-nomades, système écologique ?” in Synergies Pays Riverains de la Baltique n° 4 (2007)

Wrote with Vaucelle, C. and Abbas, Y. 2007. Touch: sensitive apparel. In CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY, 2723-2728.

Video-conference discussion: City in Flux: Eco-Mobility? with Dr. Ben Croxford, Lecturer MSc Environmental Design and Engineering; intended to students enrolled in the Master of Science Adaptive Architecture and Computation program, Digital Space and Society module taught by Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, The Bartlett, London, UK, January 22, 2007 . Event hosted by Critical Digital at Harvard GSD

Presented my up to date research on neo-nomads to students enrolled in Digital, a class taught by Michael MacPhail at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, USA, November 1, 2006

Interviewed by Rudy de Waele for m-trends.org, Women in Mobile # 16, September 23, 2006

Wrote TAXICITY-TOXICITY in JCDecaux, Mobilités: la Clé des Villes (St-Amand-Montrond, Clerc: 2006) p. 98-99 and Interviewed William J. Mitchell on the Paris Bus Line project in collaboration with the RATP; both contributing to a prospective reflection on cities initiated by the Chronos Group, Observatory of Chronomobility . JCDecaux presented the book of trends at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, June 2006

Gave a Lecture to students enrolled in the Master of Science Adaptive Architecture and Computation program, Digital Space and Society module taught by Ava Fatah gen. Schieck, The Bartlett, London, UK, November 14, 2005

Presented and debated with Nigel Thrift and Ranjit Makkuni at Ci’Num, the Digital Civilizations Forum: Conquests and Conflicts, forum “dedicated to the future of the digital revolution and designed to evaluate its social, cultural, and economic impacts”, Bordeaux, France, October 8, 2005

Interviewed by Pierre Tillinac for Sud-Ouest, the second daily French regional newspaper with a circulation of over 300.000 readers; interview entitled “Quand Les Mobilités Changent Nos Vies” = When Mobilities Change Our Lives, published October 3, 2005

Wrote “Parasites?” (Paper presented at the “Metapolis and Urban Life” workshop, UbiComp2005 Conference, Tokyo, Japan, September 10-11, 2005) and was selected to participate in the interactive 2 day workshop

Presented “Neo-nomads and the Making of Boundaries in the Age of Mobility” (Paper presented at the Mobile Geography, Presidential Choice Session, SASE2005 conference, Budapest, Hungary, July 1, 2005) . BTW, this is when and where I have met John Urry who is the mind behind the Mobilities Journal, where the article spotted above was published!

Wrote “Neo-nomads and the Nature of the Spaces of Flows” (Paper presented at the “UbiComp in the Urban Frontier” workshop, UbiComp2004 conference, Nottingham, UK, September 7, 2004) and was selected to participate in the one day workshop

Wrote “Expression of the Edge” (Paper accepted for publication, and presented at the ACSA Odysseys conference, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, February 22, 2002). A post MIT Thesis reflection on neo-nomads...

Thank you Nicolas for your post... (to read absolutely!)...

METROPOLIS Biennale in Copenhagen this weekend... highlights!

I renewed with my old love for the theater (which was also the subject of inquiry of my Architect diploma, DPLG 1997… I was then fascinated by the ‘dream manufacturing’ machines of Italian theaters). I listened to Michel Crespin, founder of “Lieux Publics”, presenting along with Yohann Floch, responsible for the international relations in HorsLesMurs, different projects involving spaces, time, bodies and objects, the social fabric and it symbols, to explain that the “arts de la rue” is a multidisciplinary art form that however ephemeral wants to transform cities; “the artist being political in the Greek sense of the term” says Crespin to whom also “La ville est une scène à 360º” (If we consider one plane).

After Christo’s building packages Crespin showed us the work of Xavier Juillot Ritalcalfoul: I particularly liked the airtight packaging (to conserve buildings) of the Royal Saltworks of Arcs et Senans, built by the famous architect of the French revolution, Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, where salt—a very precious preservative at that time—was produced.

Atopia Research did present their research + design services related to Tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka, including ICT infrastructure development, e-learning…:

ATOPIA RESEARCH INC. is a research and design organization that works globally to bring innovation, strategic thinking and design expertise to bear on some of the most intractable complex environmental and social issues that we encounter today, engaging in humanitarian relief projects and conducting research into the interdependence of informatics, economics and ecology. The organization’s mission is both charitable and educational.

The next day I met Jasmine Zimmerman, a NYC artist whose web project meshes different social fabrics together. As she writes in her manifesto:

Art is an encounter. Embodying the uncontainable and elastic nature of contemporary art, The Web Project creates situations that invite spectators to become active participants, in dialogue with both their context and each other. Encompassing the sphere of human interactions and it’s social context, installation sites become convergence points, introducing a time to be experienced and encountered by all walks of life, opening a dialogue that never ends.

I also had a delightful Sunday afternoon watching the movie Hikikomori by Francesco Jodice and Kal Karman and presented by Emiliano Gandolfi, currently the curator of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. What is happening to our cities? And again the classical question: what is the role of architects and designers in times of 'alienation'?

Pix of the session. From left to right; Marc Armengaud, Jane Harrison from Atopia, Emiliano Gandolfi.

Hikikomori? Wikipedia states that:

Hikikomori is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive adolescents and young adults who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement due to various personal and social factors in their lives. The term hikikomori refers to both the sociological phenomenon in general as well as to individuals belonging to this societal group.

Marc Armengaud, founder member of AWP presented the Troll Protocol project, which explores urban strategies at night. The project was organized in collaboration with the City on the Move.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York, Modern Library: 1993), page 65 of this re-edition:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of side-walk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance_not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in anyone place is always replete with new improvisations.

Isn’t Jane Jacobs’ writing succulent?

Now that the streets are stripped of live eyes, CCTVs take over, artificially attempting to maintain 'safety' without the freedom of the city. Surveillance. Needless to say that these ‘ubiquitous’ artificial eyes also augment the need for ‘storage’ spaces.

Enjoy the text and have a look at the website: Paris: Ville Invisible

Paris: Invisible City
Bruno Latour & Emilie Hermant

Translated from the French by Liz Carey-Libbrecht
Corrected February 2006 by Valérie Pihet

We often tend to contrast real and virtual, hard urban reality and electronic utopias. This work tries to show that real cities have a lot in common with Italo Calvino's "invisible cities". As congested, saturated and asphyxiated as it may be, in the invisible city of Paris we may learn to breathe more easily, provided we alter our social theory.

Read more about the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour.

...on neo-nomads' whereabouts:

Rhizome

Turbulence

The Pondering Primate 

Amir Rozenberg, from Connexto has been a key actor in the process of the project DiMo. Thank you Amir for your work-boosting post!

Amir is the Director of Product Management at Nextcode Corporation. Nextcode is providing ConnexTo, the mobile code scanning solution.

Remember project DiMo? Yesterday evening I was reading this article of the NYTimes: New Bar Codes Can Talk With Your Cellphone... by Louise Story | April 1, 2007. Here are some excerpts:

[...] American universities and technology companies have been experimenting with the codes in their labs for several years. Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers’ licenses and on some mailing labels, mostly for commercial use.

[...] In the United States last fall, the Canadian alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies placed the codes on concert posters.

[...] Executives at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint declined to say whether they were in discussions with the companies that make the code reading technology. Bar code companies said the carriers stood to benefit from the codes because they might encourage consumers to add Internet service plans to their accounts and spend more time on their phones."

[...] The consumer needs a reason to do it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode, a bar code company. “They don’t just wake up and say, ‘Hey, let’s go scan some bar codes.’”

If you are wondering which are these universities... well yes, there is us! Find more on the class project: DiMo blog.

A very interesting 52 minutes 1972 BBC documentary (directed by Julian Cooper) staring Reyner Banham (1922-1988), architecture theorist, member of the Independent Group, who also had contacts with Archigram.

We learn in Encyclopedia Britannica...

[...] The automobile so dominates life in this uniquely mobile community [Los Angeles] that Reyner Banham, an English observer who took his cue from scholars who study Italian in order to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so he could “read Los Angeles in the original.”

Reyner Banham is according to Nigel Whiteley the Historian of the Immediate Future!

To read as well: The kinetic icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as mobile metropolis.

Bill Thompson, an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet wrote Monday 19 March, 2007 an article entitled: In search of the neo-nomad. He writes:

As one of the millions of people who work wherever they happen to find themselves, relying on a laptop and a wireless connection for all their computing needs, I certainly live a nomadic lifestyle, pitching my virtual camp wherever I happen to find myself.

And I'd rather be a neo-nomad than a laptop warrior, a term which was clearly designed to make corporate executives feel that the evenings spent in dull business hotels in Utrecht preparing the monthly sales figures had some heroic aspect.

Nomads certainly have lots of places to settle for an hour or two of work.

And later (I am flattered):

The term neo-nomad has actually been around for a while. Researcher Yasmine Abbas calls her blog neo-nomad, and she has been writing about what she calls "digitally geared people on the move" since 2005.

Abbas is especially interested in how people who work on the move retain a sense of belonging to places and organisations, and at the way new technologies open up new ways of belonging to groups and even companies.

My good friend Simon runs an online recruitment company and it has operated as a hybrid business since it started.

There is a real office, and meetings take place there, but in general the team work remotely from wherever they happen to find themselves, whether that's in Brighton, Suffolk or Australia.

Here below is an observation that I would like to discuss for that it is often a question that comes up when I make a presentation:

Neo-nomads and digital bedouins sound very exciting, but we mustn't forget that this will only ever be a viable way of working for a small, skilled and privileged minority of people.

Will be back soon...