Press release | 15 July 2021 | sn

Joining Forces in Front of the Big Screen

Spatial changes in control centers as part of the digital transformation of urban areas as smart cities

Berlin wishes to become a smart city. To achieve this requires the digital networking of the city’s communal infrastructures, such as energy, buildings, transport, water, wastewater, trash, policing, fire services, and telecommunications. But how exactly does this digital networking function? “By bringing together the control centers of the various infrastructure sectors, which until now have been located at different sites, at one single location. Staff will continue to work as they are used to, except that now they will be sitting together in one large space,” says David Joshua Schröder. A surprising discovery for Schröder and his colleagues Professor Hubert Knoblauch and Arne Janz. They had expected something very different when they began their research into control centers and their role in the digital transformation of urban areas as smart cities. Initially they had assumed that efforts to create a smart network of control centers would result in downsizing or at least a reduction in jobs. However, the opposite has proven to be the case.

Spaces for monitoring other spaces

Control centers, operations centers, and situation centers are spaces used to monitor and manage other spaces. These could be networks of streets or the metro system, the sewer system, energy supply networks or the fire service teams in operation in the city. Equipped with state-of-the-art media technology, these control centers are where the digital transformation of urban areas takes place, creating smart cities that are climate neutral and resource efficient and that enable a good quality of life. Schröder and his fellow researchers at the “Re-figuration of spaces” collaborative research center were looking to find out how the interior architecture of these control centers, which have been around since before the digital age – we need only think of signal boxes on railways and control rooms in substations – have changed since the start of digitization in the 1990s. “We were interested in these spatial changes, as they had not yet been investigated,” says Schröder.

Research focus: Berlin’s control centers

Within Berlin, the team of sociologists examined the traffic control center of the police; the control center of the Berlin metro system; the operations center of the police; Kompetenzzentrum Kritische Infrastruktur GmbH (KKI),  a kind of service provider for control centers; as well as the control center of the Messe Berlin exhibition halls and compared these with other control centers around the world, such as in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Songdo (South Korea), Santander (Spain), Glasgow (UK), and Tel Aviv (Israel).

Combining previously physically separated working infrastructures in a single location as described above – for example in Berlin the aim is to combine the police and fire services within a single cooperative control center – is not something unique to Berlin. Whether in Rio, Songdo, or Glasgow, individual control centers are being merged within what are termed smart city operation centers. A decisive change in the spatial development of control centers. “And this comes as something of a surprise, as you would actually expect that the networking of the infrastructure would be performed digitally, i.e. through algorithmic interconnection, and that a local consolidation in the analog world would actually be obsolete,” says Schröder. But in reality these spaces are not disappearing; rather, new types of control spaces are emerging. And it seems as if people need this communal coming together in one place - Schröder calls it representative spatiality - in order to get an idea of the possibilities of digital networking, to “pre-construct” the networking spatially in order to set it in motion.

Routine operations and crisis rooms to be merged

However, it is striking that combining these different services in one space does not appear to impact how staff work. They may be sitting next to each other, but as far as routine situations go, at least, they continue to work as if they were in different rooms. “In Glasgow, for instance, where several control centers have been combined in one space, staff even somewhat ironically suggested introducing partitions between the individual areas so as not to disturb each other. Their request was rejected on the grounds that the whole point was for them to communicate with each other,” explains Schröder, according to whom the actual reason for people working next to each other is to achieve better communication in crises.

“Face-to-face communication is an important part of bringing people together by combining services within a single space,” he says. Just how important this is, is demonstrated by the fact that these new, integrated control centers are looking to get rid of the sharp division between rooms devoted to routine operations and crisis rooms. In the new types of control centers, crisis rooms, where people meet around a simple round table in the event of disruptions, crises, or disasters, are no longer so strictly separated from spaces where routine operations take place.

The visual message: everything under control

The visual appearance of these control centers plays a big role in the digital networking of urban infrastructures. “Almost no ‘smart” control center is complete without a huge screen, and globally, smart city operation centers appear to be competing to see who has the biggest,” says Schröder. “The screens use dashboards visualizing data and layers depicting the different infrastructure sectors (streets, buildings, sewer systems, etc.) of the managed outside world to convey an image of a smoothly functioning urban organism where everything is permanently under control, thus fulfilling the promise of an efficient, ecologically sustainable, and improved way of life provided by smart cities,” he says. In other words, as the public image of these control centers, the screens serve as the visual representation of this promise. Their message? Everything is running as planned, everything is safe, everything is under control.

Dramatic lighting and slogans like “your job on the Enterprise”

However, these screens are not always absolutely necessary for people to do their jobs. This at least was Schröder’s conclusion regarding Berlin. During his visit, the giant screen in the traffic control center depicting all the traffic lights in the city was out of order. When he asked how this affected operations, he was told, “It doesn’t have any impact on our work.” This response reinforces the impression of the screens as showcases. The new control centers also make considerable use of dramatic lighting to create the effect of a navigation bridge such as on Star Trek. “These visual tricks are an attempt to make working in a control center more attractive and to recruit new staff. Recruitment campaigns feature slogans like ‘Your job on the Enterprise.’ This is intended to compensate for the fact that work during routine periods is extremely monotonous but potentially extremely stressful during a crisis, a reason why control centers find it hard to attract expert staff.”

Working alone with the option to interact

Digitization also involves a de-interactivation of work. This is directly reflected in the design of the workstations in the new control centers. Whereas three people would work on an emergency call in the operations center of the Berlin police prior to digitization, one to take the call, one to write the report, and one to dispatch the patrol car, an improved computer system means that this can now be done by two people. In the future, it is planned to make it possible for just one person to do all this. People in control centers are increasingly working alone while also having the option to discuss things together. This is expressed in the positioning of individual workstations next to each other, but with the screens of each individual employee set up in a semicircle, so that they are somewhat isolated from their neighbor.

Status quo in the capital

Control centers combined within a single space, a sense of people working separately despite their physical proximity, the visual depiction of a seemingly completely digitally networked urban infrastructure via dashboards and layers on a big screen, and the de-interactivation of routine work – these are the defining features of the spatial transformation of control centers and an indication of the current status of digital transformation, in Berlin at least.

A possible indication of things to come is provided by one of the world’s smartest traffic control centers in Seoul, South Korea: A bus passing a wrongly parked car is theoretically already able to send a parking ticket directly to the car driver’s cell phone.

The research was conducted by Professor Hubert Knoblauch, Arne Janz, and David Joshua Schröder within the “Re-figuration of spaces” collaborative research center’s sub-project “Centers of coordination: the polycontextualization of power within control rooms.” The speakers of the collaborative research center are Professor Martina Löw, head of the Chair of Sociology and the Planning of Architecture, and Professor Hubert Knoblauch, head of the Chair of General Sociology.

Website of the “Re-figuration of spaces” collaborative research center

 

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