Today I want to share an article that was previously published in Studio Magazine. On this occasion, I would like to thank their coordination team for inviting me to join their first release.

Summary /Overview

 
Traditional media don’t broadcast what the citizens are debating or organizing on a daily basis. Nevertheless, thanks to Social Networks, people can receive information and interact in real time with others, taking part in debates and social movements; and the 15th of May in Spain is an example of this.

This new information ecosystem reduces the influence of the mass media and slowly forces local authorities to relate to citizens in a more direct and horizontal way.

This is a great opportunity to generate a new “social control” model, pushing local authorities to take public opinion into account.

The digital media offers a broad environment for communication so that the organisation of any given action is greatly improved; everything becomes decentralized while simultaneously connected and synchronized.

On the urban scale, we speak of the “Sentient City”, a model based on a technological/social ecosystem, where knowledge, collective actions, and interactions between individuals and groups are encouraged, taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by hybridizing physical and digital layers.

In reversing the supremacy of centralisation over individual actions, citizens can become aware of their power and organize themselves on the web.
We have the necessary technology, knowledge and dynamics to put in place more open processes of urban administration and management. Citizens have already started to move; and although public administration could take advantage of such independent and autonomous processes to deal with complex situations, it appears that a clear political will is still lacking.

The fragmented city

 
Today, the dimensions of time and space, which were historically strongly linked in a space-time continuum, are increasingly growing apart and becoming independent, in a fragmented spatial perception. Nowadays a large number of people are moving from one point to another of the city to reach their workplace, and go back home. The distance between these two points (spatial dimension) and what happens between them does not affect or interest these people in any way. Indeed, the only thing people are concerned with is the duration of the trip (time dimension).
The city is no longer a continuous place, but a structure of nodes connected in a network (network city). These nodes become increasingly more defined, organised and efficient and, the journeys between them shorter and faster thanks to technical progress. The spaces of a city that have no particular characteristics and a unique function, that is to say everything that is not a node, loose significance, including public spaces.

In such city – the “fragmented city” – we use low cost technologies (internet, telephone and transport) to move, to manage our social relationships, and to communicate with people with whom we don’t necesarilly share a common physical space like a neighbourhood.

Very often the complexity of one point exclusively consists in giving access to other points, hence the importance that movement has acquired today. Instead of living in a continuous space, we continuously move between discontinuous spaces (points or nodes).

This networked structure, unlike a continuous structure, reduces diversity and complexity. The less diversity and complexity, the greater the need to move. Every point has its function and identity. Everything seems more organised and easier to find. However, to find what we are looking for, we are compelled to move constantly to other nodes.

The majority of these journeys are done by means of transport, at a speed that does not allow any relationship with the surroundings. There is a starting point and a finishing point, with little opportunity for a surprise or a change. All this implies an impoverishment of the intermediate spaces, spaces that link different points: places are consequently public spaces.

In order to transform these kinds of cities, it is essential to intervene in everyday aspects of life which might appear to have no relationship with the design of public spaces in urban areas.

Our lifestyles are two dimensional: in situ and virtual. Now we are able to intervene in the new dimension, what we commonly call “virtual” or “digital”, . As the sociologist Manuel Castells says “Everything we do, from when the day begins until it is over, we do it with internet […] the connexion between in-situ (not real because reality is virtual and in situ at the same time) and virtual is established by us. There are not two different societies, there are two kinds of social activities and relations within ourselves. We are the ones that have to search the best way to arrange and adapt them.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info

Public Space, Sentient Space

 
According to Daniel Innerarty, in the city the homogeneous and non changing area is nothing more than an extreme case within a global area of connected local multiplicities. Instead of neighbourhoods, local networks are developed, and public debate takes place in a virtual area. In this scenario, streets and squares have ceased to be the main meeting areas.

Internet seems to offer an alternative “space” for social relationships as compared to “traditional” spaces. This can be seen as a problem leading to empty public spaces; or on the contrary, it can be considered an extraordinary opportunity to strengthen social relationships by creating the necessary budgets to improve the vitality of public spaces. Today the Internet is the “place” where community models of management are being experimented.

I believe it is important to reconsider the city as something built by everyone, and to see public areas as the ground where this process can take place. Today we have tools available that are able to act as a catalyst for participatory dynamics that were previously impossible to coordinate. There are increasing examples of processes of creation by citizens, linked to the use of new technologies. It is undeniable that Internet is a key factor contributing to changing the society. That being said I believe it is obvious that we cannot think of public space without taking into consideration the potentialities of these technologies, how they are used and how they can be an added value.

We should begin to talk about a new type of public space, a hybrid space, where technology could become a catalyst for hybridising dynamics between activities that are not traditionally connected or that are located in other (private) spaces.

Juan Freire explains this clearly: “The differentiation between spaces and physical and virtual communities is outdated. We are witnessing a hybridising process which modifies our individual identities, communitarian and territorial. Internet has contributed to the development of global networks, but paradoxically it has had a less noticeable influence in local spheres. However, digital technologies modify radically the way in which we are organised and we relate to our environment so we are already living in territories where the digital realm is as important as the physical. The hyper-local networks and hybrid public spaces are the new realities which we confront with the advent of Internet and digital culture in our local environment”.

According to Juan Freire the crisis of public (physical) spaces in urban areas is also due to the lack of (open) design, giving the citizens, once more, the opportunity to take a real interest in its use. It has also brought into debate concepts such as “hybrid spaces”, to refer to the opportunities that the hybridising of the physical with the digital sphere offers in public spaces.
We can grant the assumption of the existence of a digital skin that characterizes public spaces and devote ourselves to defining its qualities and characteristics. Instead of “hybrid” I like to use the concept of “sensitive”. “Sensitive space” refers to the “living” character of these spaces; to their capacity to promote a two-way relationship with its users, to catalyse hyper-local social networks and to visualise information related to the environment in a transparent manner.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info

Social networks and Self-organization

 
If we analyze the increase in the use of social networks on the Internet we realize that we are witnessing a process of change that will lead to the disappearance of the current dissociation between digital and in-situ identity.
Most people can continue living in complete normality without having to take care of their digital (identity) presence in social networks. Nevertheless, it is highly probable that in a few years time the concept of identity will inevitably integrate both the digital and the physical dimension. Consequently, each person will be forced to take as much care of their digital identity as of their physical identity, something that many people have been doing for some time already.

We must take several specific factors of this new kind of identity into consideration such as its peculiar time dimension. The building process of the digital identity over time leaves a footprint on the web, a visible footprint that is accessible to any user. The end result is an identity that is perceived as a sum of the past (footprint) and present identity.

Generally we control our public image by showing at each time only what we wish. However, when our identity leaves a footprint on the internet, we no longer have exclusive control over it but it is shared amongst friends and acquaintances (namely the peer group).

Each person that knows me can publish information (photographs, texts, etc…) that are directly or indirectly related to my identity without the need of my approval. This is what happens in most of the social networks.

Certainly, my digital identity will be entirely integrated in the learning process and will be increasingly associated to a physical space; that is, the idea we had about a parallel digital identity that is detached from reality does not, I think, interest anyone: in fact we do not even have time to create parallel identities.

Our identity is not only formed by way of the information that my friends and I have published, but also through the information that my devices publish. An example could be the use of services like Foursquare that allows me to upload posts in my social networks about my location at any time, taking advantage of the internet connection of our mobile phones.

To explain this phenomenon Tim Berners-Lee mentions Giant Global Graph, this means, the future Semantic Web with which we shall go from gathering the relationship between people to focus on the relationship between people and their interests (documents). Thus, if the “Internet” has allowed us to connect computers and the “Web” has allowed us to connect documents, then the “Graph” will allow us to link the documents (places, objects, etc.) and the people. So we could define the Graph as the third level of abstraction, taking into account that in each layer (Internet, Web, or Graph) we have handed over some control only in order to reach bigger benefits. A direct consequence of these dynamics is the definite statement of a (unique) identity on the web that can be recognized by any agent, person or application.

This unmistakable digital identity facilitates the development of innovative social hardware projects based on participation of a non-collective nature, where the dynamics of collaboration are the result of individual action and interaction. We are progressively discovering the self-organisation of informed societies that are capable of revolutionizing their own structures taking advantage of the virtual mirror phenomenon that enables the association of information on a given situation with individual decisions.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info based on flickr images by garpa.net & See-ming Lee

Control and decentralization

 
Social networks reinforce a new type of control: a decentralized control operated by a diversity of independent individuals that collaborate, using shared and mobile capacities of calculation and communication. Information and Communication Technologies do not present a solution, but an opportunity to improve our ability to manage territories. ICT’s can be used for many different purposes. On the one hand their enormous capacity for processing data can be used to centralize all the information and try to “solve” urban complexity; but they can also be used to open and decentralize decision-making.

The aim is to research on how ICT’s allow us to define an urban administration structure where discontinued points of control exist in an environment of self-determination (appropriation) and liberty. This is an idea that is close to the definition of tensegrity that Buckminster Fuller mentions: “islands in compression inside a tense ocean“.

The introduction of digital technologies within the physical space enables the development of new communication dynamics and relations between neighbours that improves the cohesion of local communities and their quality of life, offering a feeling of greater security.

Thanks to new technologies and to some cultural “mutations”, systems and worlds that were previously closed and not very transparent, are now open to the participation of agents (and people) who are external to their organisational structures. Citizens become more available to participate and collaborate because they are better informed and they are finally considered as useful partners for the urban administration. Architects and urban planners can reasonably begin to work keeping in touch constantly with citizens, “sharing” their decision-making “powers”.

To explain this phenomenon we can refer to the concept of “long tail” coined by Cris Anderson. The Internet and the digital environment have changed the (power) distribution laws and the market rules. The present political and economic system is based on a pyramid structure where the power (or the economic or creative potential) of many is considered inferior to the power of those that stand on the highest part of the pyramid. There is a new system based on the addition or accumulation of all the small potentials (or powers) of the mass of citizens that, thanks to the systems of communication on the internet, can equal or exceed the power (or potential) of those who are in a privileged position today. These are the old markets of masses and the new niche of markets that are pictured at the top and the bottom of the well known graph of statistical distribution.

The presence of a centralized identity is not needed when the control and feedback devices allow the actors to visualize or to become aware of the consequence of their actions. The unconscious self-organisation phenomenon becomes conscious and intended control when the individuals are allowed to understand the effects of their actions. The concept of tensegrity comes in here when it refers to an administration model where decentralized and centralized decisions are joined, avoiding the appearance of any closed and omnipresent control dynamics.

Reversing the supremacy of centralization over individual decisions, citizens can become aware of their actions and intentionally coordinate them. This process may help to restore the necessary legitimacy and credibility to the interventions that take place in degraded urban areas.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info

Towards participation: Accountability and open data

 
“Participation demands an information system, an observatory and indicators that will regularly reflect the situation of what we consider as key variables to establish our evolution, that should be accessible and comprehensible for citizens” (Agustín Hernández Aja, 2002)

In 2002, Hernández Aja, Urban planning professor at the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid, describes the essential assumptions for citizen participation. A decade later, communication models and administration dynamics that bring us close to these assumptions start to become popular.

I would like to highlight (point out) accountability and the Open Data movement.

Approaching the term accountability we can create an ecosystem of communication and transparency that can enable citizens to demand responsibilities from governing bodies. This would help us to reach the objective of decentralizing control, which is necessary for a true democracy.

Open Parlamento (openparlamento.it) is a great example of how to work to achieve accountability. It is a web-based tool that enables distributed monitoring of the work of the members of parliament in the Italian parliament.

The web page offers lots of information on draft legislation, and in general, about all the activities in the Parliament. Most interesting of all is the distributed monitoring system that allows for control of every Member of Parliament’s political activities. Every citizen can “adopt” a member and publish all their declarations and confront them with their parliamentary activity.

We can imagine this same system applied on a local scale, where citizens have greater organization capacities and power to exert pressure. The control to which all the local administrators would be subject to, would be so intense that they would nearly be obliged to start up a transformation of the administrative structures towards a more open and participatory model.

The Open Data movement is an important drive towards achieving transparency over public administration. Open Data consists of making Public Administration data available for the public, such as data related to projects that are financed with public money or managed by public institutions.

The aim is to take advantage of the data that the public administrations do not want or do not have the capacity to analyze. Releasing this data enables any person or organization to build new consultation and visualization formulas, to simplify, diversify and even to enrich the initial information.

In Spain, within this new tendency, the Open Data Euskadi project should be highlighted. It is part of the Open Government initiative of the Bask Government: a website dedicated to the exhibition of public data in a re-usable format, under open licenses. On an urban scale, two projects stand out that have been activated by two Spanish cities; Zaragoza and Córdoba. They are beginning to take their first steps in the world of Open Data.

I am convinced that citizen pressure will force all the big cities to join this process of openness and transparency.

Image by Francesco Cingolani | francescocingolani.info REAL-TIME CITY | a proposal for Smart Turin by HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés.

Open source and Network Awareness

 
As we mentioned previously, reversing the supremacy of centralization over individual actions, citizens can become aware of their “power” and begin to organize in networks.
We have the technology the knowledge and the dynamics available to introduce more open urban administration processes. Citizens have begun to move; the administrations could take advantage of these autonomous and independent processes, to manage very complex situations. However, a clear political will is still lacking.

Probably the administrators have managed to delay the transition towards a new participatory administration model, thanks to the indirect or even direct support of what is known as the “fourth power”: the media. The current information system still offers the administrators and the “powerful” a wide opportunity to manipulate and control certain processes.
The emergence of a more distributed information model is beginning to offer to any citizen the possibility to produce relevant local information. A communication ecosystem based on social media is born.
This new information ecosystem can reduce the influence of the mass media and therefore force the local administrators to enforce accountability regarding the decisions that are taken. The administrators will be compelled to relate to this new, more horizontal and distributed form of communication: an opportunity to generate “social control” that can improve transparency and force the local administrators to take the public opinion into account.

A clear example of what is being presented here, are the latest citizen mobilizations that are happening in Spain. After the 15M demonstration, an organized and authorized event, many occupations took place in numerous squares in the whole of Spain. These camps were organized in a matter of hours using Twitter and Facebook. It is impossible to exert control over these information flows and action catalysts like the occupations. Steps have been taken towards a model in which governors and administrators are going to have to understand that they cannot continue to ignore the citizens while they defend the interests of others.

We are witnessing an innovative construction process of a new communal and public sphere; the development of a new model of public space that we have called “sensitive space”. Traditional media don’t communicate what we the people are debating on a daily basis, nonetheless, thanks to Social Networks, people can receive information and interact in real time with others taking part in debates and social movements, the example of the occupation of public squares is an example of this.

It is interesting to note that the in-situ (on-site) realm is absolutely essential and how the digital media is simply offering a wider environment for communication so that the organisation of any given action is greatly improved; everything becomes decentralized while at the same time connected and synchronized.

These processes seem to be nearly inevitable. Once they are established as natural local administration processes then we will be speaking about a more favorable environment, for an Open Source City, that is, a city open to everyone’s participation.

Flickr image by Julio Albarrán

This article was originally published in urbanohumano.org and Studio Magazine.

This week Smith, who heads WeCommune, plans to launch the first software platform designed specifically for, well, communing (if you visit, you may get a splash page while they transition). The platform’s services will allow groups of three or more people to self-organize a “commune” defined by a shared interest or shared zip code, and will provide tools for communicating, organizing and managing projects, and sharing resources.

What is commune-support software?

WeCommune is a networking platform, outfitted with commune-specific project management applications that make it much different from a social networking tool. The software enables common and practical actions – for example, a group of members can organize a buying club, set up a rideshare system, or barter goods and services. And like everything on the web, WeCommune gives users the option to extend their reach: by networking to other communes, groups can make certain assets like bartering and goods-sharing pools more robust.

WeCommune offers the basic platform free to anyone who wants to use it, and even the more complex services are available for a monthly subscription under $2. Smith hopes that by making it affordable she’ll enable communes of all sorts – from those who are already sharing, like condo associations and college dorms, to neighborhoods and interest groups.

“We couldn’t find anything out there like this,” says Smith. “We feel like if we hit a home run, we’re going to be the ultimate community application.”

Why communes need the boost

In her L.A.-based studio, Ecoshack, Smith designs small-scale, modular projects like ecovillages, yurts and tipis that “invent new ways to live lightly on the Earth.” But her real vision for sustainability acknowledges that the way people interact with one another, use resources and build community are the most important components of any environment, from eco-enclave to suburban cul-de-sac. As it turns out, a lot of people were willing to help her test her theory. When she launched a site called Wanna Start a Commune? as an Ecoshack spinoff, she quickly connected with three cul-de-sac neighborhoods in Southern California that invited her to help them start their own communes. Since then, she’s become a self-titled “meta-starter of communes.”

Almost from the first meetings of her three “Beta test” cul-de-sac communes, however, she noticed that even where there was intention, there weren’t effective tools available for completing projects in a group. Nascent communes would have ideas, for example, to create a disaster preparedness plan for their neighborhood, or to turn a neglected space into a community garden. But coordinating schedules, resources, skill sets and other components of the plan among neighbors — many of whom had never been in the same room before — was more trouble than Smith had anticipated. Software seemed like an intuitive solution.

“The group members said, ‘isn’t there an iPhone app for that?’,” she remembers. “And these aren’t 21-year-olds; these are older people, too. I had to solve a technology problem.”

Smith tested out versions of existing social networking software, including Ning and Yahoo! Groups, but didn’t find the functionality that she was looking for. So she sat down and designed her own, with the help of collaborator Matt French and programmer Josh Cain.

An unlikely champion

Smith doesn’t live in a commune herself, and defines herself — somewhat ironically — as a loner. But her comfortable distance from the subject has given her a more objective lens for understanding community – how it works, and what gets in its way. She’s been studying community since the mid-90s, when she explored it in her master’s thesis at Harvard, under the tutelage of master architect Rem Koolhas. Smith found herself in China in 1996, a turbulent time characterized by extreme real estate speculation and the burst of a housing bubble. She focused her research on one intriguing social pattern: as groups of rural villagers moved to the cities in droves, they would often move collectively into one concrete apartment building, and re-create the community structure. Smith found the process fascinating. In her words, “They would take these global pieces of architecture as their own, and make them very local again.” (Her thesis, To Get Rich is Glorious, is published in the collection Great Leap Forward.)

The community solution, Smith says, “allowed these people not only to be housed, but to be housed in these tight communities where they could flourish…it gave me hope that, in fact, local cultures would be able to fight globalization and stay intact.” Now, she says, in the face of the global economic meltdown, she still sees hope for community-based solutions. Ultimately, she thinks, a worldwide trend toward resource-sharing could be just the medicine the economy needs.

It certainly seems like the right platform could touch off a communing revolution. But here’s a thought: while we’re in the kickoff phases, it might also be time for a new term that defines this particular brand of resourcefulness. Smith chose “commune” because it’s actually pretty versatile (she cites Wikipedia’s definition, “a community in which resources are shared”). But even though great, innovative ideas, practices and cultures emerged from communes in the 60s, the word itself remains pretty loaded with counter-cultural connotations that don’t seems as universally sticky in 2009.

Is the 21st Century commune a strategic collaboration? Or does the stretchiness of communal resources make for elastic living? We’ll work on some new language from our end, but in the meantime, call out your best ideas for the new communal meme in the comments.

Finding community (by any name) isn’t that difficult, Smith says, but it can involve looking for things that aren’t obvious to most people.

“You need to understand that your community isn’t necessarily your group of best friends. You need to ask yourself, ‘do we have a shared value set so that we feel comfortable planning projects and sharing resources over time? Do we have people of various ages who feel comfortable sharing their skills? Do we have a social infrastructure for getting things done?”

source: www.worldchanging.com

This interview is in the framework of a Phd research about new technologies and hybrid cities. It aims to demonstrate how this new tools can revitalize public spaces at the city.

how would you define public space?

I understand a public space as an area or place that is open and accessible to all citizens without discriminations; Nowadays public spaces have their digital counterparts where people gather, share, and engage with each other and their environment.

how would you describe public space at our cities nowadays? (problems and qualities)

The integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles is transforming contemporary public spaces. In consequence, it may not only matter how good the physical infrastructure is, it is the software infrastructure that also affects how individuals experience it. The ubiquitous technologies (e.g. mobile phone, RFID, sensors) that afford us new flexibility in experiencing public spaces are simultaneously providing the means to reveal our dynamics through the collection, classification, storage, and dissemination of recorded knowledge constituting a city.  However contemporary public spaces are not only about technology, they are also about interaction designs, about taking into account the wider context of organization, systems and people, and even legal and political contexts, belief systems and social and cultural fabric. If we do not understand these aspects, we are prone to make the same mistakes as those originated by past visions that relied on the fascination around the hard infrastructures and reducing cities and their spaces to systems.

what would you change at public spaces ? (proposals, solutions)

The presence of the soft infrastructure and its logging capabilities implies that we are at the end of the ephemeral; in some ways we have new means to replay the public spaces. This potential echoes very well with the recent interest of urban planners and designers in unconventional data sources. Currently land use and space activity data are mainly collected through very traditional means with people paid to perform manual count. These non-longitudinal data limit the emergence of evidences from the statistical relations with variables (e.g. What is the effect of physical layout on movement? How do people use the space?). With the increasing availability of soft infrastructure the process of data collection is improved. For instance, it allows to better model time, space, and behavior as investigated in the domain of simulations. In contrast, we are also ahead of conflicts to reveal or hide unwanted evidences, when new data can be used to the detriment of some stakeholders. Indeed the retrieved information might not be of primary benefit of each individual who contributes to a census. Moreover, some of this information can challenge political decisions that were previously taken based on assumptions or limited survey data. For instance it might lead to a decrease in the offering of public transport in an unjustifiably well-connected public space.

This end of the ephemeral calls for new approaches to privacy issues. In many domains, there is an ever growing number of personalized records which are being collected in public spaces, and at times disseminated in the databases and customer management systems of businesses, organizations, and government agencies that service modern living. In fact, these digital footprints have become inevitable in contemporary society and also necessary if we wish to enjoy many modern conveniences; we can no more be separated from it than we could be separated from the physical shadow cast by our body on a sunny day (Zook et al., 2004). The growth of our data shadows is an ambiguous process, with varying levels of individual concern and the voluntarily trading of privacy for convenience in many cases.

In summary, at the same time as ubiquitous geoinformation gives us new means to map and model human dynamics, it will also challenge current notions of privacy and make the object of study much more fragmented, dynamic, and chaotic. The challenge will be to appreciate and use the complexity and richness of ubiquitous geofinformation without crystallizing into authoritarian structures.

how do you think new technologies influence on public space’s changes? (hybrid spaces)

The ubiquitous technologies that afford us new flexibility in conducting our daily activities are simultaneously providing the means to study our activities in time and space. Indeed, the logs, fruits of these interactions, could reveal elements of human and social use of the ubiquitous technology itself and people’s mobility and travel behaviors. These latter evidences could be employed as indicators of the evolution of the attractiveness of the public spaces amongst other things (Girardin et al, 2009).

In other words, the aim is exploit the information membrane hovering over the physical fabric of public spaces to shift the urban design and planning practices from the speculative predictions and accommodation to more factual observations and improvements. Besides my work on urban attractiveness indicators, other research groups have been using a reality mining approach to derive specific characteristics of urban dynamics (Kostakos et al., 2008). A major challenge in this type of approaches is to draw a clear understanding of the boundaries and biases of the data. Nevertheless, these works support novel ways to describe public spaces leading to an approach we would coin as “human/database urbanism: It could consist in the use of:

The qualitative analysis to inform the quantitative queries: This approach first focuses on people and their practices, without the assumption that something computational or data process is meant to fall out from that. This qualitative angle can then inform a quantitative analysis to generate more empirical evidences of a specific human behavior or pattern. A few approaches in that domain address this perspective. Williams et al (2008) for instance argue that our understanding of the city could benefit from a situated analysis of individual experiences within cities, rather than taking particular urban forms as a starting point for the study of urban experience.

The quantitative data mining to inform the qualitative enquiries: In that approach, the quantitative data help to reveal the emerging and abnormal behaviors, mainly raising questions. The qualitative angle then can help explaining phenomenon in situation. The qualitative approaches actually requests to ask the right questions to learn anything meaningful about a situation.

In conclusion, beyond a utilitarian perspective, we have to consider the promises and hopes around these future cities and their informational membranes. If researchers and practitioners offer citizen better awareness of the dynamics of public space and power to influence their design and evolution, this does not mean they will accept the gift. Indeed, taking the example of citizen-science (Paulos et al., 2008) and volunteer-generated information (Goodchild, 2007), citizens might just not be interested in the collection of data, and the opportunity might increase the divide between the people who are able to participate and those who are not or do not.

Interview: video.

References:

Girardin, F., Vaccari, A., Gerber, A., Biderman, A., and Ratti, C. (2009). Quantifying urban attractiveness from the distribution and density of digital footprints. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructure Research, 4

Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as voluntary sensors: Spatial data infrastructure in the world of web 2.0. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 2:24–32.

Kostakos, V., Nicolai, T., Yoneki, E., O’neill, E., Kenn, H., and Crowcroft, J. (2008). Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

Paulos, E., Honicky, R., and Hooker, B. (2008). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, chapter Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism. Hershey.

Williams, A., Robles, E., and Dourish, P. (2008). Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City, chapter Urbane-ing the City: Examining and Refining the Assumptions
Behind Urban Informatics. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global.

Zook, M., Dodge, M., Aoyama, Y., and Townsend, A. (2004). New digital geographies: Information, communication, and place. Geography and Technology, pages 155–176.

Fabien Girardin is a researcher and engineer at Lift lab, a research agency he co-founded. He studies and provokes the interplay between urban infrastructures, ubiquitous technologies and people practices. His research employs qualitative observations to gain insights from the integration and user appropriation of technologies in urban environments. Subsequently, Fabien mixes the gained knowledge with engineering techniques to foresee and prototype ideas and solutions for designers, urban service providers, city planners and decision makers.

He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Digital Communications from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain and an engineering degree from the Biel School of Engineering and Information Technology, Switzerland. Along his academic journey, Fabien was also affiliated with the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA to lead the development of analysis methods of spatio-temporal records generated by human interactions with urban pervasive infrastructures.

I would be grateful for any suggestion and contact of other people who might be interested in being interviewed about public spaces and new technologies.

Domenico Di Siena