Digital Urban Narratives: The Images of the City in the Age of Big Data (original) (raw)

The digital superstructure of the city at the age of the global information processes

"This paper explores the spatial experience of the city connected with global information processes. The aim of this paper is to examine both the architectural and philosophical side of the problem. Inside the classic urban space, the ‘datacity’ produces a new urban digital space made by the data flowing constantly in a virtual and ethereal context whose form - polyedrical or curvilinear - is invisible to us. Data have created a new topography of space inside the city. Built the most with a topography based on the harmony and intersection between cardo and decumano, or reproducing the reticular plan of a greek polis, city own today a ‘digital superstructure’, a network of data flowing from one point to another of the city through cables or wireless networks. This digital superstructure produces every day an enormous amount of information which has a direct influence on human life. We claim that our naïve and intuitive link to the world takes root in the space through an embodied conscience which is, from its very beginning, motile/spatial. Open and closed spaces seem to be conceived to convey a certain spatial and perceptive experience. The architectural environment can refine sensibility and enlarge consciousness by exploiting the multiple possibilities of human perception and motility. Involved in an urban environment, my body immediately knows, without any prior knowledge, how to move and act in it because space is the counterpart of human motility. The rise of a ‘datacity’ during the last three decades has provoked a multiplication of the plans of the perception which are connected nowadays with other forms of human experiences. If urban structures seem to be conceived to experience body’s motor faculties, datacity’s structure stimulates experiences on different virtual plans which are related with new physical, sensorial and knowledge fields. The structure of the datacity seems to be dynamic and constantly in-movement according to its constant auto-shaping nature. In this virtual and ethereal topography my body becomes part of a wider interconnecting system involving me and other digital inhabitants or elements around me. What’s the essence of this very new structure and what attitude is one to take to understand ‘datacity’? This paper will be presented at the International Conference Amber that will take place in Istanbul, November 2010. http://www.amberplatform.org/root/amberplatform/amberfestival-2010-theme-meeting/"

City: A Vanishing Act or A Cultural Dialogue? Digital Technologies as a finite product or means of processes?

Starting with a theoretical dialogue on the current "modus operandi" of the City through the prism of «new technologies», this paper discusses whether they are providing new «tropes» of social interaction and coexistence. Through the presentation of examples of socially driven operations in the Athenian Urban Grid (Hive Athens, Re-think Athens, Community based design networks), urban space is viewed as an ongoing production of spatial relations, as a field of infinite transformations beyond design. The discussion focuses on the ability of new technologies to transform cities into "communication modes" incorporating issues beyond morphogenesis, identified in the decision-making process leading to it. Finally, it raises some questions on whether new technologies, as socially embedded processes, can be rendered as the backbone of the social structure; whether, they can transform the urban environment into a place of constant participatory actions, into unique civic laboratories, and thus innovate the term "hybrid city".

Digital Urban Identities

Each city is in possession of a representative and meaningful digital identity. This identity is complex and interactive: it implies and entails patterns of human urban participation, “the experience of a city”. It also implies and entails the interpersonal profiles required for communication in urban scenarios. This complexity of representation is constituted by meaningful data complexes processed online via the metropolis of digit(al) convergence and divergence and operates the “common” platforms of the city online. Urban digital representation constitutes a/the digital identity of a town and is organized via multiple networking. Online city networks traffic city contents, including real time, real space people online and within – some of them via professional (marketing) communication and via user-generated contents. This networking environment is a virtual blazon of the city, its space and timing are interfaces within networking: it defines symbolic loci and events (time) with platforms and applications and focuses on probable social-cultural collaboration real time in and among public places. These are the common places of the urban algorithms. This virtual Other may provide some reflection for real time life (e.g. geotagging), and, also, for various virtual projections of the city (c.f. “Second Life”). Cities represent, communicate and mediate their operations both real time offline and online. The city is the media and this defines its attributes, organizes its loci. This presentation interprets the city within online digital New Media environments as a digital identity with branded contents for collaboration, with multiple user-networking – and with online chains of channels with chances of engagement.

Germaine R. Halegoua (2019). The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place. New York: New York University Press.

Changing Societies & Personalities, 2020

Techno-capitalist urban redevelopment is marked by an increased popularity of digital urban governance and various intersections between platforms and urbanity. These exacerbate the existing socio-spatial inequalities while depolitisizing dataisation and digitalization, which now are widely considered the popular ways of general advancement of city life, particularly by authorities of all levels and corporations. While research into so-called "smart" or "digital" cities has mushroomed over the two last decades there remain some considerable gaps in our understanding of the links among the tangible, physical urban spaces, and the changes that the digital age brings, namely and most elementary, that participating in city life is impossible without being plugged.

Digital City as a Metaphor for New Experiences of Reality

2020

In the era of already spent utopias and ideas about the city the experience of the city is transformed into a new perceptual grammar that is a consequence of the new virtual reality. With the revolutionary computerization of architecture a new architectural discourse was created that enabled virtual one – cyberspace, producing a new experience of transposed reality. The concept of a digital city does not exist without a virtual community, which on the other hand problematizes the issue of digital city ethics, bearing in mind that its use is conditioned by technical and technological possibilities, which are still not available to everyone. Digitalization of space communicates the newly created virtual dialogue between the user and space, outside of his physical and sensory experience and interaction with space, thus agreeing to the digitalization of the experience of space. By creating a new reality and a new era of the utopia of virtual architecture and virtual city, a new, cyberid...

Cities and the Digital Revolution Aligning technology and humanity

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This book explores the emergence and development of data in cities. It exposes how Information Communication Technology (ICT) corporations seeking to capitalize on cities developing needs for urban technologies have contributed to many of the issues we are faced with today, including urbanization, centralization of wealth and climate change. Using several case studies, the book provides examples of the, in part, detrimental effects ICT driven ‘Smart City’ solutions have had and will have on the human characteristics that contribute to the identity and sense of belonging innate to many of our cities. The rise in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and technologies like social media, has changed how people interact with and in cities, and Allam discusses of how these changes require planners, engineers and other urban professionals to adjust their approach. The main question the book seeks to address is ‘how can we use emerging technologies to recalibrate our cities and ensure increased livability, whilst also effectively dealing with their associate challenges?’ This is an ongoing conversation, but one that requires extensive thought as it has extensive consequences. This book will be of interest to students, academics, professionals and policy makers across a broad range of subjects including urban studies, architecture and STS, geography and social policy.

Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big Data

The two authors of the MIT based Senseable City Lab show how Big Data change reality and, hence, the way we deal with the city. They demonstrate how the Lab interprets digital data as material that can be used for the formulation of a different urban future. The publication also looks at the negative aspects of the city-related data acquisition and control.

Towards the metaphorical transformation of urban space: digital art and the city after the Web 2.0

Revista Digital do Laboratório de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Santa Maria, Brasil, 2016

The digital revolution has often been associated with the blurring of geographical boundaries, as it has led to new forms of territorial recognition and (un)differentiation. As physical distances have vanished, barriers have become more ambiguous and increasingly conditioned by digital reconfigurations of actual and fictional places. After the Web 2.0, geographical representations of cities were redefined by electronic connections, thus paving the way for new networked cartographies, parallel to, but not necessarily dependent on, their material reality. This metaphorical transformation of the physical space into images and information, permanently (ex)changed and updated on the Internet, promoted an unsteady dialectics between tangible and subjective dimensions. While some frontiers are tending to disappear, new ones are also being created, as the emergence of new digital (or digitised) territories with specific access protocols and cartographies has generated new forms of social and cultural exclusion. Focusing on Digital and Post-Digital Art, this paper discusses this recent situation, observing how contemporary artists have proposed alternative systems for the appropriation and representation of urban spaces.

Urban media geographies: Interfacing ubiquitous computing with the physicality of urban space

2013

This paper aims at establishing an associative relation between the proliferating digital technologies, the physical context of the urban fabric, its inhabitants and the multiplicity of their activities as an emergent phenomenon of contemporary urbanity. It introduces a methodological framework for the development of an interactive urban system, installed within urban open public spaces, in the form of a hybrid interface that can serve as a platform designated for both citizens and municipal planning authorities. This particular system harnesses and analyzes real-time, quantifiable traces of diverse everyday urban activities and subsequently feeds this analyzed information back in a looped manner to citizens via the proposed public interfaces. Subsequently they can observe, interact and declare their own activity-driven, customized spatial and infrastructural usage and transformation alternatives. In other words, the platform does not only imply interaction at an information exchang...

Overlapping cities: Trans-urban augmentation in the digital era of western cities

Estudios del hábitat

The digital revolution has produced and is still creating new lifestyles that are being reflected in a new urban revolution which sees the overlapping of different environments to enrich the urban experience and respond to emergent necessities. It leads to a dissolution of the strictly defined spaces and uses to create hybrid places that colonize the urban environment. The dualities of public and private, of exterior and interior, of work and leisure, of man and woman, of house and city, are then changing, and with them also the traditional pillars of the modern society. The digital is overlapping the material, changing the urban organizational structure through new relationship between people, city and technology in a new reality recently dubbed the “metaverse”. Most of the spatial needs are then transformed, opening up to a profound rethinking of the structure of places and of the meaning itself of urban environment. The article analyses the current relationship between the materi...