The Right to the Citi(zen)

Method and Materials

I have used a case methodology (Creswell, 1998, Chap. 4), inspired by ethnographic methods, to better understand Malmo in Second Life. I combined information gathered from a large number of sources to get a better understanding of this case. The written texts included in the material are Malmö city’s application to the European Structural Funds and the final report concluding the project. I also carried out three producer interviews: the administrator responsible for the virtual environment at City Hall in Malmö, the web designer who actually built the environment, and a PR agent who owned a Second Life environment for many years (The Second Sweden), which Malmö took over as the starting point for its project. These interviews were all conducted offline and recorded and transcribed. I also conducted participant observations in the virtual environment between December 2009 and May 2011, hanging out, observing, and talking to people about their experiences in the virtual city. Besides these informal chats, I also conducted four more formal interviews with participants in the virtual world. During these interviews, we discussed Malmö’s city project and their experiences of it. These interviews were saved as written text. I quote the producers using their real names; the avatars have been made anonymous in the text.

At the time of the virtual city’s existence, there were 10 to 15 blogs reporting on the Swedish Second Life community on a more or less regular basis. These blogs were not focused exclusively on Malmo in Second Life. They also commented on the Swedish Second Life community and its different events. I read these blogs, looking for information about Malmo in Second Life, in search of a variety of voices about the project.

The most active of the magazines covering Second Life at the time was the journal, Slainthe, which was published more or less on a regular basis between 2007 and 2010. Several articles in the journal discuss Malmö’s Second Life project, from its early days to its closing down as a virtual city.

In addition, I have also gathered and analyzed articles from the Swedish and international daily press and magazines that commented generally on Second Life and more specifically on its Swedish activities, in contexts as widespread as Australia, the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Germany though most thoroughly, of course, in Sweden. My analysis focuses on how the city administration and the users of Malmo in Second Life constructed the digital environment as urban space.

Are There Citizens in New Media Environments?

Joppke (2007) has identified three diverse discourses in the citizen debate: citizen as status, right, or identity. Although there are legal rights associated with being inhabitants of cities (or municipalities) in Sweden, citizenship as identity is the focus here as no formal or juridical issues actually turned out to be involved in the project once it started. According to Joppke (2007), citizenship as identity refers to the “behavioral aspects of individuals acting and conceiving of themselves as members of a collectivity, classically the nation, or the normative conceptions of such behavior imputed by the state” (p. 38). Citizenship as identity, thus, means having a sense of belonging to a spatially organized community and adapting to duties and rights associated with that belonging. This is well in line with Lefebvre’s thoughts in The right to the city. As Purcell (2002) insightfully proclaimed, to fully understand The right to the city, we need to distinguish between citizens on the one hand and inhabitants (citadins) on the other. It is those who inhabit urban ground who should be given the right to make decisions about it and to truly participate in its development and appropriate its spaces (Lefebvre, 1968). Here, I relate specifically to the discussion about “urban citizenship” as “a form of citizenship that is embedded in the reconfigurations of identity and belonging that are unique to the everyday settings of urban life” (Allon, 2013; see also Holston & Appadurai, 1999; Schwarz, 2013; Uitermark, Rossi, & van Houtum, 2005), rather than connected to legislative aspects of democratic rights and formal political participation (Bauböck, 2003). When referring to a city’s inhabitants as citizens, the city administration adheres to a kind of urban citizenship: A sense of belonging with associated responsibilities and duties. In the analysis that follows, my aim is to understand the difficulties this project met by analyzing the virtual city as space. This means taking into account for whom the virtual city was built, the city’s hopes of dialogue with its citizens, the users’ understanding of the virtual space, and their relationships with the city administration.

Producing Urban Space in a Virtual World

Malmö is not the first city to use Second Life for civic projects. In their article “Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement,” Gordon and Koo (2008) present a successful example of the use of Second Life for democratic experimentation. They refer to a project in Boston, USA, where Second Life was used to “strengthen the ability of neighbourhood residents to create meaningful places” (p. 205). A placeworld is a subgroup of the Habermasian lifeworld that is organized around a shared understanding of place. It emerges when people share a common understanding of place, when a group brings a place into shared relevance. Gordon and Koo (2008) argue that multiuser virtual environments enable local groups to strengthen their expression and experience of place. In their development of the concept, Gordon and Koo follow the phenomenological tradition that understands place as experienced space (cf. Malpas, 1999; Tuan, 1977), in which “space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan, 1977, p. 6). Place is, thus, regarded as fixed in time, a fixity that allows for the true nature of place to appear. In this analysis, I instead adhere to a Lefebvrian perspective on space as it opens up for an understanding of space that is more sensitive to its power dimensions. According to Lefebvre, the character of a place cannot be fixed and separate from movements in time, and places are negotiated in relation to different situations, unique and generated by a crossing of trajectories in time and space, always political, never neutral (Lefebvre, 1974/1991; see also Massey, 2005). Massey (1993) puts forward three dimensions of place that are important for the understanding of Malmö’s civic experiment and the lack of shared understanding between the city administration and the inhabitants of the virtual islands: its nonstatic character, its links to the outside, and the open boundaries of places to the external world. ¹ Massey also argues that places have multiple identities, are defined by conflict, and that each place, “is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations” (Massey, 1993, p. 66; Massey, 2005).

A shared understanding of place, of the kind that Gordon and Koo (2008) found in Boston, was never created in Malmo in Second Life; rather, Malmö’s virtual city was conflictual from its start to its end. To comprehend the lack of shared understanding of place, I take a closer look at Malmo in Second Life’s spatial and temporal connections, trajectories and links as the city administration and users of the virtual world articulated them, respectively. In the next section, I first present a brief history of Malmo in Second Life.

Malmo in Second Life: Urban Spaces Online ²

Malmö city administration used new technology intensively for a couple of years to develop the city’s democracy. Inspired by the “Swedish Embassy” in Second Life, a virtual embassy launched in 2007 (see Bengtsson, 2011), the administration decided to establish a virtual city, Malmo in Second Life, for the benefit of its citizens and local democracy. As a virtual city, Malmo in Second Life was part of a larger vision of how new technology could bring Malmö’s inhabitants closer to the city administration and to each other, and how using the anonymity of the virtual world could improve services for citizens. The project aimed at “increasing the accessibility, and usefulness of, information technology to strengthen the competitiveness and employment of the region.” The project application specified that

Malmö city’s goal is to be cutting edge when it comes to technological development, as well as fulfilling our permanent task: reaching out with services and information to citizens of all age groups. To satisfy these, demands on fast, simple, reliable and individual service become increasingly important. When reaching out with information and services, especially to younger generations, there are additional demands on packaging messages in new arenas. [ . . . ] The target group for this project is mainly young adults, aged 18-30. (Malmö city’s application to the Department for the development of the industry [Verket för näringslivsutveckling] and the European Structure Funds. Personal handover)

The financial crisis in late 2008 changed the basis of the project, however, and City Hall decided to “see if we can make it work, if we in any way can establish some kind of communication with the citizens in a different way” (G. Lindhe, personal communication, October 12, 2009).

On May 6, 2009, the newly built Malmö environments were officially inaugurated. To enhance a feeling of homecoming, the urban space was modelled on some well-known environments in Malmö city, with the city library as the most important institutional monument (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1:

Malmö city library, in Malmo in Second Life.

Numerous events, parties, contests, and a discussion forum on environmental issues took place in Malmo in Second Life, arranged both by Malmö city and the Swedish community in Second Life. In February 2010, after a big farewell party, the Malmo in Second Life era ended.

In-World and Out-World Criticisms

Malmö city’s democratic experiments in Second Life were never as successful as the Boston example referred to by Gordon and Koo (2008), and when trying to understand the construction of Malmo in Second Life as place, many aspects have to be taken into account. I start by putting forward the different kinds of criticisms that were voiced about the project, out-world criticism primarily from people who were not actually involved in the virtual world, and in-world criticism voiced by Second Life users.

The out-world criticism dealt primarily with Second Life as a platform at that time (“too late”), and the amount of money spent on the project (“too expensive”). The first point was mainly represented in readers’ comments not only in mainstream media but also in more specialized computer magazines and in the blogosphere. These comments varied from unarticulated outbursts such as “Hahaha, biggest joke of the day” (Dduck, 2009). To more detailed criticism, such as in this blog post:

Fail of the day! Malmö city opens in . . . Second Life?!

Sometimes it’s good when local politicians try to keep up with the latest technology. Sometimes it is not. Malmö city announced that it will host a house warming party in Second Life today. Classic Internet expression: Fail! If you don’t know what Second Life is, don’t feel bad. It’s a virtual world that was almost cool when it was launched in 2003.

[ . . . ]

I hope you haven’t spent too much on this, Malmö . . . Maybe this year’s weirdest Internet project! :-)

Criticism regarding finances came from a different angle: newspapers and TV news, including their audiences’ comments, and in many blogs. One reader commented in the local newspaper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet and argued,

1.2 million for this crap? What’s that? Like SEK 100 000 per person visiting the crap after the opening? SL was, just like Twitter, for instance, something that the media hyped to death and glorified even though no one really used/uses it in real life. Everyone involved in this project should be fired immediately for TOTAL incompetence! What were you thinking? (Guttis, 2009)

The in-world criticism focused mainly on two things: that the city of Malmö did not fully realize the potential of the medium (“too little engagement”) and that the virtual city did not offer its visitors enough entertainment (“too boring”). The first kind of criticism came from avatars who were very engaged in the future of Second Life, and the in-world magazine, Slainthe, eagerly discussed the topic throughout the life of the project. In its first issue in 2009, it was addressed in the following terms:

Malmo – to be or not to be, that is the question?

Is there political will?

What happens in Malmo? Or what doesn’t happen? More and more of the inhabitants of Second Life’s Swedish areas are asking themselves this question. Here, in this magazine’s editorial office, we’ve noticed increasing discontent and astonishment about how activities are handled in the three Malmo sims.

[ . . . ]

“Where is Rosengård with all its inhabitants and problems in Second Life?” ³

“Where are Malmö’s schools?”

“Where is the culture?”

“Where are all the societies and unions?”

“Where is the job centre?”

“Where are the police and other social aspects?” (Uggla, 2009)

The other type of in-world criticism, “the too boring” criticism, made it clear that users of Second Life had expectations that conflicted with the resources and intentions of Malmö. A blog frequented by members of the Swedish community in Second Life published a post answering the question why Malmo in Second Life failed:

They should have built some houses too, so that people could rent at a reasonable price. It would become more crowded then. Shops and a traditional community park with fun activities, and it needs a dance floor too. Also, if they organised some type of treasure hunt or other kinds of contests that attracted people there? Something like a boat race? Preferably, some streets to facilitate driving, that’s usually appreciated. There are a million things you could do, and it wouldn’t have to be expensive. It’s all about getting people there! (Kranfel, 2009)

Spatial Trajectories and Temporal Rhythms

There are many reasons why the urban space remained so empty during its time online. First, the global media hype surrounding Second Life in the mid- to late 2000s inspired many public and commercial agents to enter (Bengtsson, 2011, 2012; Kücklich, 2009). However, by the time that Malmo in Second Life was inaugurated, this discourse had turned from positive and affirmative to negative and even scornful, something that probably kept many Malmö inhabitants from visiting the virtual city. Thus, the majority of actual visitors were already familiar with the virtual world, unlike Malmö city administration, which caused some discursive clashes.

In the next section, I focus specifically on how the city administration and the virtual inhabitants related to the virtual city as place. The discursive conflict regarding what Malmo in Second Life really was is a clue to understanding why Malmö city never managed to establish communication with its citizens in the digital environment. The spatial and temporal links and trajectories that connect an urban space to other spatial contexts are important, and explain why the city administration and the users of the virtual world understood and appropriated the virtual city differently.

Spatial Trajectories

First, there was disagreement regarding the city’s spatial connections. For Malmö city administration, Malmo in Second Life was “frankly a new meeting point within Malmö city,” as G. Lindhe (personal communication, October 12, 2009) put it. Consequently, the administration regarded the city of Malmö and the Skåne region in Southern Sweden as the geographical and cultural context of the virtual islands. The users of the virtual city, however, had other expectations for the character of the place. Many researchers have highlighted the creativity and playfulness of virtual worlds (Boellstorff, 2008; Castronova, 2007; Gordon & Koo, 2008; Kücklich, 2009; Pearce & Artemesia, 2009) as among their most noticeable characteristics. This playfulness is articulated in the creation of events and happenings and in the constant construction (and reconstruction) of spaces in the virtual world. To succeed in engaging citizens in a Second Life project, Gordon and Koo (2008) conclude that true community involvement needs to be based on some kind of imminent redesign and development (see also Gordon & Manosevitch, 2011). Since the Malmö simulations (sims) were constructed to look like Malmö in real life (IRL), and designed to be recognizable as Malmö by its users, they remained static during their time online, profoundly contradicting the spatial expectations of the users of the virtual world.

Another area of conflict, which comes with the diverse spatial contextualization of the virtual urban space, was the anonymity of its users, sometimes put forward as one of the core elements of life online (cf. Turkle, 1984). Although the anonymity of the virtual world was one of Malmö’s initial reasons for entering the online platform, it turned out to be problematic in relation to regulations governing public communication in Sweden. Members of the Swedish community in Second Life offered to help Malmö city arrange events in the Malmö sims in exchange for payment. They claim to have been turned down, as doing business with anonymous avatars was impossible for the municipality.

The anonymity of the virtual world was an important part of Malmö’s decision to enter Second Life, but the city’s connections and engagement with others online still had to adapt to the laws and regulations of the offline world.

Although there were obviously users of Second Life who were engaged in Malmö’s Second Life project, and who felt frustrated by what they regarded as low-intensity engagement from city hall, their engagement was primarily connected to engaging in Second Life rather than in Malmö as an offline city. The blog post quoted earlier, where an avatar suggests entertainment, contests, roads, and shops to make Malmo in Second Life more attractive to users, highlights that the improvements to the Malmö islands suggested in the blog were based on experiences in Second Life, that is on other sim owners’ success in the virtual world (in terms of attracting visitors), rather than how Swedish municipalities attempted to engage their citizens.

Temporal Rhythms

Spatial dimensions of place are also connected to temporal rhythms (cf. Lefebvre, 1992/2004) and the temporal trajectories of place (Massey, 2005). Thus, the various spatial understandings of Malmo in Second Life also include temporal dimensions.

According to the city administration, the virtual city was intertwined with the temporal structure of the city of Malmö, which, compared with the virtual world, has a long history and a long-term future. Thus, in the eyes of the city administration, Malmo in Second Life shared Malmö city’s industrial, mainly working class, background and its transformation into a lively, culturally diversified present, and an assumed future. Therefore, Malmö city worked on a virtual meeting point in accordance with the temporal structure it used for other meeting points in the city and, as a result, failed to create events and entertainment that specifically met the expectations of the users of the virtual world. One avatar expressed frustration about the lack of activities in the Malmö sims, and what she perceived as a malfunction of Malmo in Second Life:

Considering the more everyday activities of Swedish municipalities, this lack of event planning in the urban space seems perfectly natural. Urban spaces are not usually theme parks and do not offer their inhabitants a full timetable of entertainment. However, compared with the entertainment offered by many other sim owners, it seemed odd (and fundamentally boring).

Since creating land in Second Life is free and relatively easy (for those who have the skills), and thus regarded by many as a key factor in the virtual world (cf. Pearce & Artemesia, 2009), the amount of land available is huge. As a consequence, Second Life has often, especially in the media, been criticized for offering large amounts of dead space, while lacking enough people for socializing (i.e., Collins, 2010). Following on from this, a status hierarchy has evolved in which a large amount of sim traffic and a vibrant and lively atmosphere is attractive and worth striving for. The fixity of the urban spaces of Malmo in Second Life thus essentially counteracted this core element of virtual culture in general, and the culture of Second Life in particular, and Malmö administration got complaints about this.

Some think that it’s really nice, and some that it’s so damn boring, and, like, “no, nothing, there’s nothing going on here,” “come on, make things happen.” I mean, I believe that if I had someone who could spend their time administrating it. Making a concert happen. Like, that would have been wonderful. Because I think we would have had great, great possibilities. (G. Lindhe, personal communication, October 12, 2009)

The avatars’ understanding of the activities in Malmo in Second Life as infrequent or even lacking, follows their temporal experiences of sims as temporary, shifting, and eventful as well as their spatial understanding of Malmo in Second Life as belonging within Second Life, rather than in the world outside.

Finally, the discursive conflict regarding Malmo in Second Life also included a dimension that is neither spatial nor temporal: that of commercial versus public space. The conflict over the virtual world’s commercial character is exemplified here by the demand for shops in the blog comment quoted earlier, and by a quote from an interview with Grethe Lindhe, where she claims that

We’ve said that in Malmö, we don’t want that. It’s like, we don’t want to run it commercially because that could turn out negative too. So we’ve said that, no, we don’t want any shops where you can buy stuff, that’s something they will have to do elsewhere. (G. Lindhe, personal communication, October 12, 2009)

Malmö’s city administration and its users, that is the regular visitors to Second Life, did not have a shared understanding of Malmo in Second Life as urban space, either as to its relevance or what it actually was. The city administration regarded the platform as a part of Malmö and wanted to use it to communicate with citizens and to discuss future developments of Malmö city, while many of the users did not connect the virtual city to its offline equivalent, but related it to it as just an online platform as any other in Second Life. These dissimilar understandings of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the virtual city explain why no shared idea of place, no placeworld, and, thus, no real communication were established between the city administration and the citizens.

The “Right to the Citizen’ in a New Media Environment

The virtual world, Second Life, peaked in media attention and interest from the surrounding world from 2006 to 2008. After that, interest declined and many commercially and publicly organized projects in the virtual environment were abandoned. One important factor in the failure of Malmo in Second Life is, of course, the shifting media discourses regarding Second Life, which changed from curious and utopian to mocking and ridiculing within a few years (Bengtsson, 2011). Democratic experiments in new media environments like Second Life can be fruitful, as in the Boston project described by Gordon and Koo (2008). However, that project was limited in time and space and took specific advantage of the creativity of the virtual world and its design values (see Gordon & Koo, 2008; Gordon & Manosevitch, 2011). Establishing a virtual space in more long-term communication between the city administration and citizens, as Malmö tried to, was less successful as the conflicting discourses regarding Malmo in Second Life as urban space persisted throughout its entire time online. Malmö city administration saw the virtual islands as a public place in Malmö, noncommercial and open, like a library, a park or a refurbished square. In the virtual world, the city administration met various reactions from engaged users who wanted to help out and work in the virtual environment to those who asked for entertainment and wanted to be entertained. My analysis concludes that users of the virtual world where the urban space was located are addressed as, and behave like, consumers rather than citizens, and that is why searching for citizens in this digital space was futile from the start. I have argued that this communicative deficit came from a lack of shared articulation about the virtual island as place, resulting in a lack of common motivation to cooperate in developing it.

Malmö’s ambition to communicate with its citizens in Second Life was a major failure. Why? There are several reasons, including a worldwide decline in interest in Second Life. Another reason, however, is that the city of Malmö did not find the citizens it was looking for there. There are three reasons for this: the spatial character of the virtual world, the commercial character of the virtual world, and the dissimilar ways the city administration and the users articulated the virtual space.

Digital Media Spatiality and Citizenship

The previously mentioned difficulties that Second Life met more generally toward the end of the 2000s caused serious problems for the city when trying to get people to visit the virtual city in the first place. Related to these problems is also the spatial organization of online spaces. Virtual geographies are organized differently compared with their offline counterparts, the proximity of virtual geographies makes all places equally near to all users (Kalay & Marx, 2005). Places in Second Life can, thus, easily be reached from all over the globe (where there is adequate Internet access). For Malmö, it was the dwellers, those who inhabit the city of Malmö, who were the target group for its online project, although, when online, those local dwellers were spread out in many, many different places (and might not even have been to this particular virtual world at all). Malmö city administration had little information about who actually visited the sims (because of the anonymity of the virtual world). Nonetheless, according to G. Lindhe (personal communication, October 15, 2009), the executive administrator of the virtual city, visitors from all over the world came, among whom few felt motivated to discuss the future of Malmö city.

Commercial Media Cultures and Citizenship

The second reason for the failure was the commercial character of the environment. For many users, Malmo in Second Life’s location on a commercially organized platform overshadowed other dimensions of the project. Two primary aspects can be put forward: First, that many users saw the virtual space mainly as an arena for entertainment rather than somewhere for joint engagement in public matters. Thomas Malaby (2010) has described Second Life as “anti-institutional” space, free from offline authorities and societal structures, and this commercially organized environment lacks governmental structures. This means that the norm of action is that of the amateur: passionate, engaged, quick, and informal. Many of the users are also producers; they have their own land where they engage in the production of space and happenings, and they do not need public organizations (or commercial businesses) to provide that for them. In this commercially organized and amateur-based culture, Malmö city failed to achieve the position it needed within the community to be able to communicate. Grethe Lindhe at Malmö City Hall also addressed this aspect, but from the perspective of the city administration,

The problem with these things, as I see it, is that the avatars, who go there regularly, expect almost like a full-time service with entertainment seven days a week. And that’s just not something we can do, we don’t have that kind of time to spend. (G. Lindhe, personal communication, October 12, 2009)

As participants in Second Life are offered a variety of entertainment daily, easily reachable and free to take part in; there was little to entice them to visit a static, low-intensity Swedish island where not much happened. Malmö’s attempts to discuss common matters with the inhabitants of the city were, hence, easily turned down benefiting other events elsewhere in the virtual world (or outside of it).

Citizenship Articulation and New Media

The third and final reason for failure is that being a citizen, also as part of one’s identity, is articulated according to the context in which the person acts (and that context can be constructed differently by different individuals). From the example of Malmo in Second Life, we can conclude that people must feel like citizens to be able to act as such and that most visitors of Malmo in Second Life did not regard themselves as citizens when in the virtual world. This is why a city–citizen relationship between city administration and the users of Malmo in Second Life was never established. One group of avatars, for example, claimed to have offered Malmö city help running the virtual islands, while wanting to be paid for their efforts. This was an odd request in the context of city–citizen relationships, but perfectly normal in a relationship between an employer and an employee. Rather than meeting citizens, Malmö city administration met a vital and changing underground culture with users who were accustomed to being addressed as, and behaving like, customers.

Malmö city wanted to benefit from virtual technology by using it to communicate with its citizens. However, its attempt was not very successful, as Second Life, like many other digital media platforms, is not a space where our citizenry is articulated. Rob Shields (2013) has concluded, “A right to the city enfranchises a new citizen, who is not simply a user of the city but a participant in its creation and participation” (p. 346). From the above analysis, we can conclude that the increasing use of commercially organized media environments for democratic communication may be harmful to such enfranchisement. Digital media not only offers public actors possibilities to expand urban space in new exciting environments they also transform the basis of who we become and how we act in urban spaces. The probable increase in the presence of public actors in commercial media environments in the future strongly underlines the importance of creating public, noncommercial, spaces where people can meet and discuss common matters as citizens, also online. And on the behalf of those who want to communicate with citizens in noncommercial spaces, to Lefebvre’s cry for the right to the city, add a call for a right to the citizen.