Conference Proceedings - NUL | Full Papers Session 3 | by Planum n.27 vol.2/2013

SESSION 3

ICT: Sharing Visions of the City

CHAIRS: KATHARINE WILLIS, PAOLA PUCCI

NUL

NUL - NEW URBAN LANGUAGES

BY PLANUM. THE JOURNAL OF URBANISM ISSN 1723-0993 | WWW.PLANUM.NET PROCEEDINGS PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER 2013

Introduction

This theme explores the relationship and role that digital media can have in the representation and experience of urban spaces and places. Web-based and geosocial applications are transforming our understanding and interactions that can occur in contemporary urban spaces. We continue to discover opportunities for integrating physical and digital places in ways that connect and enable meaningful engagement between the variety of spaces/places in which we live today. As a result of the changes introduced by the network and social media, at least two questions become relevant: -First, groups of people can communicate more quickly and more easily than in the past, promoting and sharing use of the city and lifestyles (through ICT); -In second place, this type of information can result of some use to designers and planners in preparing housing solutions. The connection between innovative techniques of representation and communication possibilities given by the social networks allow the creation of images, easy to communicate, easy to understand, and ultimately more immediate to share.

SESSION 3

ICT: Sharing Visions of the City CHAIRS: KATHARINE WILLIS, PAOLA PUCCI

New strategies for learning architectural design: a videogame simulating the design process in urban environment Valeria Bruni, Paola Mellano, Roberta Spallone Urban public space: convergence point of physical and digital evironments. Mapping the accessibility in the ‘knowledge economy’ era Rossella Ferorelli, Raana Saffari Siahkali Google Street View: image of the urban as raw material Cheryl R. Gilge Text-Space dynamics. The digital media in defining new urban languages Giulio Lughi Smart urbanization: emerging paradigms of sensing and managing urban systems Venkata Krishna Kumar Matturi Digital Mapping: the analysis of the social realm of Urbino Corinna Morandi, Riccardo Palmieri, Bogdan Stojanovic, Ludovica Tomarchio The urban and the self across three utopias. Mediated representations in urban Vietnam Paolo Patelli Mapping the changing city through mobile phone data Paola Pucci, Fabio Manfredini, Paolo Tagliolato Learning from places: ICTs for EXPO2015 in the Turin-Milan region Andrea Rolando, Tijana Djordjevic Discussion forums about the city. Images, texts and representation at an urban scale Matteo Giuseppe Romanato A multitude of use-values. Is digital media informing current dynamics of production of public space?

Rodrigo Andres Barrios Salcedo

New strategies for learning architectural design: a videogame simulating the design process in urban environment Valeria Bruni

Politecnico di Torino DAD Department of Architecture and Design E-mail: valeria.bruni@polito.it

Paolo Mellano

Politecnico di Torino DAD Department of Architecture and Design E-mail: paolo.mellano@polito.it

Roberta Spallone

Politecnico di Torino DIST Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning E-mail: roberta.spallone@polito.it

As demonstrated by significant sociological studies, gaming activities allow behavioral experiments that otherwise would not occur. Today some International Universities use gaming activities, in particular video games, for educational purposes. In the architectural field, characterized by increasing complexities in design process, the video game could be the device to learn the practical aspects connecting architectural and urban design strategies. In this paper we would illustrate the research project "ArchiLOGIC", aimed to synthesize the design process by producing a virtual application that is able to assess the architectural and urban results in a qualitative way. Thanks to the new dynamic forms of tale, screening and communication of the urban design, it is possible to figure out a virtual device with the ability to reproduce the dynamics connected to the design process in the real world.

Keywords: architectural video game, learning, virtual school

1. Introduction As demonstrated by significant sociological studies, gaming activities allow behavioral experiments that otherwise would not occur. Today some international universities use gaming activities, in particular video games, for educational purposes.

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In the architectural field, characterized by increasing complexities in design process, the video game could be the device to learn the practical aspects connecting architectural and urban design strategies.

In this paper we illustrate the research project "ArchiLOGIC", aimed to synthesize the design process by producing a virtual application that is able to assess the architectural and urban results in a qualitative way.

Thanks to the new dynamic forms of tale, screening and communication of the urban design, it is possible to figure out a virtual device with the ability to reproduce the dynamics connected to the design process in the real world.

In ArchiLOGIC players face urban and architectural design at different levels. The goal is to provide a design, building it with a firm and seeing it experienced by citizens. It is necessary to complete the mission according with physics, economy and society rules. Players have an initial budget that they will use to meet the game requirements. In ArchiLOGIC game action takes place in a heavily anthropized context, on the western city model. Here the historical matrix determines conformation and character. Settling the gameplay in a populated space, actually existing, players know the project influencing elements by practice, they understand the close relationship between the design parties.

By simplifying and reducing the complexity of the design process, the urban space thus becomes fertile ground for architects and architecture students experimentation. Within ArchiLOGIC teachers can load one or more projects in a simple and intuitive way. The preparation of the environment 3D model, which will be defined during the demo development, would use external platforms, using the latest systems of procedural modeling and working through the GIS data acquisition.

Game score will be visible through four sustainability indicators: ecological, spatial, economic, social.

For all design elements the contribution provided for each sustainability type will be shown, so that players can always be aware of their decision effects in the design context. Players will interact with game elements and characters through their avatar. By fulfilling all the brief requirements, game ends and final score is showed.

2. Why videogames for learning Architectural design?

"Of course, working hard on the project, two lines intersect: one is programmatic, drawn by memory, reason and will; the other is definitely empirical, it is headed by attempt, chance and deepening" (Gabetti and Isola, in Ciucci, 1989). By giving students programmatic tools, in ArchiLOGIC they learn through practical experience.

The draft of an architectural and urban design videogame comes from significant sociological studies on the game action. Game allows behavioral maturation of the individual through practical experimentation.

Game action doesn’t lead to consequences that would result in society, thus allowing you to make choices, mistakes, to experiment with new solutions (Bateson, 1996). The German psychologist Buhler in 1949 (Ibidem) defines game: "functional pleasure", a pleasure that comes from exercising functions that are going to be fully developed. The ArchiLOGIC game takes his approach drawing on those design methodologies that feed on conflict between different components involved in transforming environment, overcoming the shape control "obsession".

Therefore, videogame design extends the scope of its action on tools that allow and organize the interaction between spaces, streams, environments and users more than on the configuration of physical, three-dimensional structures. A dynamic and diagrammatic attitude where the prevalence of processes on objects and of methods on results, turns the project into the result of a complex intent ecology.

Videogames are characterized by interactivity and multimedia besides advantages of message simultaneity.

Interactivity implies the presence of predefined paths, players can go wrong many times, but through the mistake they can reach the result. The perceptual experience is comparable to that of the real world as actual, substantial, real (Fusco, 2006), thanks to the empirical knowledge process.

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Figure 1. Conceptual frameworks of comparison between the structures of text and game

An example of educational videogame for universities is Ice Cream Empire (see: www.icecreamempire.it, last view on 02.05.2013). It was created in 2010 by the Bocconi University in Milan. It is a simulation game to 'train' economics schools students to management business management. The device used to play the game is the mobile phone and it had already grown to more than 18,000 members two years after its creation.

The aim of ArchiLOGIC is thus to formulate bases for the realization of a video game that allows users to deal with all stages, from preliminary design up to the (virtual) building of the architectural object, by making the real creation process of the architectural work accessible through the digital instrument.

Videogames are closely related with architecture and more recent approaches to the project are deeply connected with videogames and their structure.

When it comes to design teaching approach at Architectural Association of London, Innocenti says that abandoning the cause and effect linearity for a complex and nonlinear approach has been in place as an option since the fifties (www.architettura.it/files/2004021002, last view on 02.05.2013).

The new perspective on the systems organization stems from a shift in the point of view, from the classical determinism top-down logic to that bottom-up of the emergence theory.

Top-down and bottom-up models are strategies of information processing and knowledge management, dealing mainly with software and, by extension, other humanistic theories and systems theories. In general, these methods are employed for analyzing problem situations and find appropriate hypotheses to their solution: for example the development of a specific software, the mathematical or geometrical problems solving, the processing of a text, the resolution of a practical/operational problem.

In ArchiLOGIC, the selected approach is ‘bottom-up’: we aim at refocusing attention on the design logic, shifting the emphasis from purely formal aspects. In general we can say that the videogame structure is based on countless geometric and logic relationships that influence gameplay. Every action performed by each user activates a simultaneous exchange of multiple data and information.

Therefore, by taking advantage of viedogames inherent structure, players can handle large amounts of data at the same time (even if unconsciously) allowing the interiorization of relationships that always exist between the design elements. In the bottom-up information flow the cognitive process is characterized by knowledge of all variables that can affect system elements. It is the holistic approach.

That setting can leave the highest level of freedom to players, who can choose the design process.

During their undergraduate degree course, students experiment design methods depending on the specific objectives of the class. Thanks to the cotinuous comparison with teaching staff, the design process can be understood and criticized, internalized and critically revised by students. The interactive tool is different, the same design experience can be repeated many times, though never repetitive with the holistic

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approach. Players can, in this way, experience the design acting intuitively to achieve with practice full consciousness.

3. Methods and tools of representation for ArchiLOGIC Videogames are different from any other kinds of media, although they resume their various languages (Gee, 2003). They have several features that make them unique and operate differently from others, such as the language of the game play is unique among traditional narrative media. Some studies stated that interactivity is what distinguishes video games from other forms of mass entertainment media. This feature allows the game to exercise potentialities of attraction and immersivity that other media do not have. To play a game is to learn a new language, one native to the medium of videogames, rich in the culture of gaming and spoken fluently by its players.

Dynamic visual communication is the core of this new media that needs also the presence of texts and sounds, shaping itself like a multimedia. Observed by Engeli, multimediality is an effective communications medium. It is fascinating because it involves more senses at the same time. More are the senses involved in receiving information; better is our concentration (Engeli, 1999).

When we look at the idea of using videogames in an academic field, as a part of programs to teach students new knowledge, skills and abilities, we assume that games could teach to think and solve problems and change users' behavior.

Videogames could help and improve didactic experiences by means of new techniques for reaching a digitally savvy audience (Thomas, 2008). Used for this purpose, videogame can be related to "serious game". Serious games enable new types of educational experience that can be rigorously, effectively, and consistently deployed, increasing the power of any teaching group that well uses them.

When McLuhan clarified that “any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment�

(McLuhan, 1964), he pressed for a deep reading of new media. The emergence of a new medium does more than require mastery of a new vocabulary.

An educational videogame like ArchiLOGIC reduces the complexity of the real designing process to a limited number of variables; it is possible to distinguish the game from reality.

The choice of the visual language must necessarily consider that the video game has educational purpose conveyed to students of Architecture, which, from the beginning of their university studies, learn to read architectural and urban drawings and to communicate their design ideas through the projection methods and the graphical representation techniques. The figurative choices of Archilogic are not therefore comparable to those of videogames with recreational functions, generally characterized by a detached realism or even hyperrealism, neither to those of educational videogames created for students not expert in the conventional representations.

Different kinds of graphical communication will characterize the phase of output of data and restrictions, set up from the game, integrated to the map for orientation, and the phase of input of the projectual solutions elaborated by players.

If many videogames, also those of entertainment, make wide use of maps, that are often visualized by mixed projective methods, elements not to scale and unconventional symbols, in ArchiLOGIC the tools for the orientation may be more rigorous, facilitating, at the same time, the understanding of the space.

Meaningful territorial sections may be accompanied to plan views, while colors and symbols will allow thematic readings, organized by layer. Additional information for players will come from threedimensional models of the city context in axonometric view, which will concur to deepen the knowledge both of the conformations of city tissue and of the spatial relations between the buildings. The various representation and visualization types above mentioned will be integrated from the diagrammatic representation, which introduces interesting potentialities for the analysis and the following management of the project.

In architecture, diagrams have in the last few years been introduced as part of a technique that promotes a proliferating, generating and instrumentalising approach to design. As van Berkel and Bos affirm: "the essence of the diagrammatic technique is that it introduces into a work qualities that are unspoken,

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disconnected from an ideal or an ideology, random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic qualities that can be physical, structural, spatial or technical. [...] The diagram is not a metaphor or paradigm, but an 'abstract machine' that is both content and expression" (van Berkel B., Bos C., 1999).

In the projectual phase it will not resort to a 3D modelling work, that it would involve an expansion of game times, but to the composition of juxtaposing and overlaying volumes.

The passage from the orthographic and axonometric visualizations to those perspective ones "in subjective", with possible and expectable animations by walk and fly-through, will concur to estimate the perceptive effects generates from the different compositive solutions.

Figure 2. Diagram of ArchiLOGIC design process Figure 3. Conceptual framework of relationships between stakeholders

The metaproject of ArchiLOGIC ArchiLOGIC is therefore an architectural design serious game. It focuses on teaching a sensitive approach to the project rather than on the design specific standards.

To do this, the game must respond to players' actions in a critical way, bringing attention to qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of the project.

Therefore it is necessary to clarify how to make the interactive application able to judge the design quality.

We define the game rules, according to which the score rises or falls during the action, formalizing a spatial and morphological urban environment analysis method.

According to a series of international studies, gathered in the late '90s by the governmental guide ‘By Design’, which presents the conventional approach to urban design quality, the 'urban design is defined as the art of creating places for people, which concerns the connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and buildings.

Inspired by these studies, the score is defined through four sustainability levels: spatial, ecological, social, economic. The optimal feature of urban design are listed and described below. They then are translated into a mathematical algorithm by ArchiLOGIC and become the main evaluation tools of the project.

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Figure 4. Diagram of ArchiLOGIC proof of concept

Character and identity: promotion of the character in the urban space and landscape in response to the distinctive local patterns of development and culture, by strengthening them.

Continuity and closure: promotion of the street frontage continuity, and public and private spaces clear definition.

Public spaces quality: promotion of pleasant, safe and uncongested public spaces and routes; efficient for the entire population, including disabled and elderly.

Easy movement: promotion of accessibility and local permeability, with the creation of places connected together and easily accessible, placing traffic needs in the background from the people ones.

Readability: promotion of the territory readability, with recognizable routes, intersections and landmarks.

Adaptability: promotion of environment adaptability through the development, in order to respond to social, economical and technological changes.

Diversity: promotion of diversity, allowing the choice between different kinds of developments and uses which are interconnected in creating viable places that respond to local needs.

Urban Sustainability: to enforce resources and energy utilization patterns in relation to the urban environment pollution, increasing the global and local environmental conditions perception.

Maintenance of public spaces; to avoid permeability decrease when private spaces overwhelm public ones.

Finding solutions to the urban edges emergence: avoiding the dispersion of industrial, institutional and commercial functions in suburbs. Loss of character. In suburbs it predominates a lifestyle based on car use.

Finding solutions to the urban centers threat and the "urban renaissance": urban centres adaptation to a role focused on leisure and finance activities, "creative industries", production of high-value services, the renewed metropolitan life popularity. Avoiding the growing territory corruption: resulting from the prosperous growth and increased demand for higher quality life, aging of the population in many rich countries and increase of a single component households. Need to urban regeneration resulting from the structural economic change: industrial decline in many cities and impossibility for new industries and

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services to face the global economy and the need to invest in slums and retrieve large ports and territories of obsolete railways.

Affordable housing: affordable housing shortage, together with the continuously rising prices, leaves aside a significant part of the world's population.

Starting from these assumptions, we proceed by defining the parameters that will influence the score four levels of sustainability, social, ecological, economic and spatial.

The idea for this schematization came from The Function Mixer (see: MVRDV, 2003), a software designed by MVRDV, which triggered the implementation of multidimensional processes leading to the creation of sustainable, complex, different and functional environments.

This software gives back physical and spatial data translated into three-dimensional model by qualitative parameters, through the mathematical algorithm.

The optimization of this process has been defined through the Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE), interweaving the various urban design needs.

It is necessary to introduce a cost-benefit analysis to develop ArchiLOGIC. It will include the analysis of parameters generated by the designed space. However, the process that we intend to use here is opposite to the one proposed by the Function Mixer.

The method allows the computer to operate a qualitative assessment of the player design, by developing quantitative data entered by the same during the game action.

A similar process called "Space Syntax" (www.spacesyntax.net/software, last view on 02.05.2013) was developed in the early '80s by Professor Hillier with his group at the University College of London.

The "Space Syntax" assumption is indivisibility and interaction between morphological space and society.

Through the Multi-Criteria Evaluation it allows identification of a rules set that, if followed, will ensure architectural achievement through the Analytical Network Process.

The urban form is evaluated through public space morphology and structure. The three key factors are: vitality, security, development. The study of morphology and society is based on the position of people in space and their movements. The foundation of it all is people natural movement. In ArchiLOGIC the computational method is used to recreate the natural human flows in space, and then analyze and evaluate it. It is therefore necessary to define the virtual limits that will convey these flows.

Referred to the 4 sustainability levels, it is possible to identify 12 parameters that influence them: Space sustainability directly affected by: natural lighting, efficiency, diversity.

Economic sustainability directly affected by: flexibility, cost of construction, value.

Social sustainability directly affected by accessibility, relationships, prevention of crime.

Ecological sustainability directly i affected by: energy, modal split, green.

The 12 parameters do not include all the elements that influence in general the architectural design, but can cover a wide range of relations between the parties and are hence valid at the game educational purpose.

In ArchiLOGIC the design evaluation, and therefore the definition of players’ score, will be through the screening of the identified parameters. The game should be able, through the mathematical algorithm, to decide whether to increase or decrease score.

Each parameter, in fact, indirectly influence all, or almost all, the sustainability levels which is not directly connected to. In this way it is possible to figure out the complexity of design elements relationships.

Players will be able to realize the influence of their choices, with ever new and unexpected scenarios. So the achievement of the game goals is free from default locations.

Players could implement the design according to their priorities and at the same time they can understand the effects of actions taken in an intuitive way.

Once the design is finished, players can see the total score. There is a maximum level of attainable score.

The higher the level of sustainability achieved, the higher the quality of the project.

So configuration scenarios of the score are endless as the compositional possibilities of the player.

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Figure 5. ArchiLOGIC score defined through four sustainability levels

4. Conclusions ArchiLOGIC metaproject development is currently accomplished. Later stages of the work include the development of a prototype, a demo developed by a team of engineers, computer scientists and scholars of representation and multimedia communication, and its test on a significant sample of teachers and students, until its launch on the web.

Figure 6. Diagram of ArchiLOGIC sustainability levels and sublevels with their impacts on buildings, quarters and city

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Figure 7. Graphic interface of ArchiLOGIC: site plan and axonometric view of masterplan

Figure 8. 3D digital models with alternative design interventions

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References Ciucci G. (1989), L'architettura italiana oggi, racconto di una generazione, Laterza, Roma - Bari.

Bateson G. (1996), Questo è un gioco, Cortina Edizioni, Milano.

Fusco, I. (2006), Virtual Geographic, Costa & Nolan, Milano.

Gee J.P. (2003), What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, MacMillan, New York.

Engeli M. (1999), Storie digitali. Poetiche della comunicazione, Testo&Immagine, Torino.

Thomas D. (2008), "Messages and Mediums: Learning to Teach With Videogames", in Davidson D., Beyond Fun. Serious Games and Media, ETC Press, Pittsburgh.

McLuhan M. (1964), Understanding media, Mentor, New York. van Berkel B., Bos C. (1999), Move, UN Studio & Goose Press, Amsterdam.

MVRDV (2003), "MVRD1991-2002 Studio Projects", El Croquis, no. 86, Madrid, December 2003.

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Urban public space: convergence point of physical and digital environments Mapping the accessibility in the ‘knowledge economy’ era Rossella Ferorelli Politecnico di Milano E-mail: rossellaferorelli@gmail.com

Raana Saffari Siahkali

Politecnico di Milano E-mail: raana.saffari@gmail.com

The recent urban dynamicity has been mainly intensified by the emergence of intangible components of the communication era. Since the architecture is somehow the physical embodiment of man’s interaction with his environment, such phenomena, above all other features, have had consequences also in architectural and urban projects.

The problem of ‘publicness’ in the contemporary urban space has gained further complexities due to the changing meaning of ‘accessibility’ into ‘check in’ as in some geo-social networks. Therefore the concept of ‘access’ is turning from ‘public right’ into ‘merchandise’, creating conflicts between the need for free accessibility to the public spaces - in both physical and digital terms - and the private interests behind the new born ‘knowledge economies’.

The paper will examine the mentioned problem - in a selected case study - by overlapping maps of the ‘wireless’ environment with physical infrastructural network, analyzing the coherence, lacks and potentials to conceive their future convergence within the public spaces system.

Keywords: Physical/Digital Infrastructure, Accessibility, Public Space

1. Introduction Before the late 18th century, the urban contexts, besides their morphological characters and forms, were representing the main information and orientation of the city for the travelers and strangers about the city structure. For instance, meydan in the Islamic architecture, or piazza in the occidental one, along with the dimensions of the streets – which end into these open spaces or come from them – have always been the best elements to keep oriented while moving in the cities and so were the monuments and ‘land marks’ according to Lynch (Lynch, K., 1960). Therefore the perception and observation of a pedestrian along the way was related to the speed of his movement and had an essential role in experiencing the spaces while

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passing through the urban context. In this case, the ‘city fabric’ was the most important provider of the spatial information and the monuments, according to Aldo Rossi (Rossi A., 1976), were the emblematic image of the whole city’s deconstruction – as city’s memories of the past. Throughout the time and by the technological developments and industrializations, followed by increasing the movement speed, the role of these elements had been reduced and left just inside the short pedestrian paths.

Nowadays, with the invention of the internet and the development of informatics, the role of these information providers are shifting to the communication instruments such as smart phones, tablets, etc..

Their presence in the daily activities and their influence on the physical experiences of the space are evident. In fact, it seems that both spaces – reality and virtual – with the same functional aspects and different kind of experiential dimensions are changing the present lifestyles simultaneously. Accordingly, we might realize two ranges of velocity in the urban mutation process: the cities physical contexts mute with a slower speed – measured in seconds/minutes –, while alterations of the non-physical layer (related to the communicative devices and the narration of information) are measured by megabytes/gigabytes.

Therefore, the lack of compatibility between these two speed ranges makes the contemporary urban spaces more intricate to comprehend when ‘human sense of time’– as Kevin Lynch states – is gaining a new and different ‘biological rhythm’ until the question: «what time is this place?» (Lynch, K., 1976).

Accordingly, the spatial experience of the persons is somehow losing its physical and tactile qualities while the ‘immaterial dimension’ of urban public spaces – related to the communicative devices and the narration of information – is becoming more dominant. In such a situation, while the architectural forms, and so the spatial dimensions of these spaces, remains the same – or mutes slowly –, their spector is quickly changing, as if the media were being assembled to the built body of urban spaces as a ‘prosthesis’ that overshadows the physical forms, or as a new layer, above the constructed environment. Beside the psychological problems of the issue, the problem of contemporary public space, in the architectural and urban design field, therefore, could be: how to think and create forms that will be able to embody the layer of information and communication inside themselves? The mentioned problem relates, as explained before, to the separation of the physical layer and the immaterial layer of these spaces. It means that the main components of the physical dimensions are detached from the immaterial dimension, namely: • narration of fluid information; • time unit; • simultaneity of presence, or the accessibility to information from different places at the same time and, in so, being present virtually in more than one place simultaneously.

Based on what has been explained previously, the questions that rise here are: how can we describe contemporary ‘good city form’? (ibid.) and with what indicators can we measure ‘vitality, sense, fit, access and control’ (ibid.) within the urban public spaces?

The revolutionary process of the media and communication technologies is developing inevitably and future generations will witness its consequences in the architectural and urban forms. This research could be an opportunity to analyze and re-reading the different passages of the media and communication development within the urban contexts as an attempt to anticipate the future typologies of the urban public spaces. «Now we have made e new nature – this technological urbanized region which is the new chaos – but as architects and urbanists we still have the same task» (Frampton, K., LeCuyer, A.W., 1999).

2. The importance of access as new paradigm of publicness evaluation in urban spaces Since, in the knowledge economy era, we are witnessing the rise of the cognitive capitalism and a consequential, deep erosion of the threshold between work and leisure life time, the urban spaces involved in the different activity spheres undergo a similar identity blurring. Private (our relationships) and public life (our work) are therefore melted in urban places whose degree of ‘publicness’ becomes increasingly uneven and uncertain, needing a radical revision of the criteria to be adopted for its evaluation.

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Ali Madanipour suggests an adjustment of criteria earlier drawn by other authors as a composition of ‘interest’, ‘actors’ and ‘access’ (Benn I., Gaus G. F., 1983), particularly concentrating on the latter, to which he gives further articulations, dividing it in: • Physical access: as material access to the environment; • Social (or symbolic) access: in relation to the positive or negative reception that specific social groups experience in the space; • Access to activities and discussions: particularly regarding development and use processes of the space itself; • Access to information: again regarding development and use processes of the space itself (Madanipour A., 2010).

Concerning the last point, however, it could be argued that a deep comprehension of the meaning and the importance of information as a measuring indicator for access has been heavily underestimated by the author, particularly if we assume a point of view oriented to the contemporary aims of planning the ‘city smartness’ as a system of networked public spaces (Pinto A. J., Remesar A., Brandão P., Nunes da Silva F., 2010). Moreover, access should be intended not only as accessibility from outside to the public space, but much more as the capability of the space itself to provide access from inside to the global dimension, namely the web. This new feature could be named – using a neologism – ‘accessitivity’, and therefore we are dealing about the rise of the necessity of ‘accessive’ public spaces.

But, other than this, another element needs very cautious observation: the increasingly broad distribution of locative media, or media that use mobile devices to exchange data based onto geographical information.

Their undoubted rise, along with the spread use of the so called ‘location-based social networks’ (LBSN, or otherwise ‘geosocial’ networks) and their asymptotic convergence with the GIS (Sui D., Goodchild M., 2011) puts some new questions about the topic of access as a hybrid physical/non-physical urban issue.

This becomes progressively clearer as the main feature the most well-known LBSN are built around is the ‘check-in’. We could take Foursquare as the easiest and most appropriate example1, but similar functions are also present in Facebook (which has recently acquired Gowalla2), Google Latitude, Twitter and basically in every social network with geographic utilities. In all of them, every user can create the identity of a ‘place’, geotagging its presence on a shared map. From that moment on, all the users become able to check in that ‘place’. In Foursquare, particularly, a series of gamification tactics provide the user with high motivation to check in those ‘places’ whose identity is linked to commercial business in the real world3. These tactics are basically borrowed to the field of strategic marketing (as discounts, promotions, gifts or advantageous sale options) and generating profits for both the place owner (in terms of increased business) and the social network (in terms of traffic, subscriptions and personal information submitted), providing a social service that is apparently free for the user, who is actually paying it with a new form of exposure to commercial aggression. In fact, some of the mentioned location-based applications include the use of ‘geofences’, that are virtual perimeters geotagged around a ‘place’. Crossing these boundaries causes some forms of data exchange between the citizen/user and the application, often implying the receipt of a sponsored notification.

As in airports or everywhere the act of trespassing a threshold is loaded with critical meaning, making a check-in for a real place (fully belonging to the urban physical dimension) on a social network (only existing as an online ambit) is equivalent to making an access declaration and, therefore, acknowledging the existence of a barrier in the physical environment, even if an immaterial (or cognitive) one. If, in terms of defense of a urban publicness principle, this phenomenon could in any case be considered at least controversial, it actually seems even more alarming since it turns out as fully based upon a commercial nature, or pure private economic interest.

The choice has been made based on the vast use and popularity of the application as it is used continuously by over 30 million users, as described in http://www.foursquare.com 2 The news is online since dicember the 2nd, 2011, on CNN Money: http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/02/technology/gowalla_facebook/index.htm [last access april 4, 2013] 3 As clearly explained in the dedicated page: http://business.foursquare.com/.

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But, other than this, new problems emerge when we are called to witness an increasing diffusion of the use of LBSNs as tools for the self-representation (and therefore, self-description and self spatial and strategic orientation) of the city. The following part describes an investigational inquiry – still in progress – as a phase of ‘experimental contextualization’ regarding the themes of access and publicness of the urban space through the analysis of what could be called a problem of ‘public ethics of urban representation’ in the location-aware information era.

3. An experimental contextualization As explained above, the recent urban dynamicity could trustingly be said to be intensified by the emergence of digital communication ambits. Therefore, the main focus of this part is on the cognition of these ambits in relation with the spatial analysis of ‘physical accessibility’ of the defined case study in order to prepare the basis for a re-examination and verification progress of the traditional/classic spatial indicators – exactly those vitality, sense, fit, access and control Lynch dealt about.

The main goal of this phase is therefore to examine possible answers to the following questions: how do these ‘digital communication ambits’ relate to the physical space we inhabit? And how can we, as designers and planners, define this in relation to space-use, space-publicness and their connectivity, permeability and porosity in both physical and virtual dimensions?

The proposed framework is divided into three main actions in two ambits. The actions are divided into ‘Exploration’, ‘Extraction’ (II) and ‘Exam’, which occur in physical and virtual ambits. The context is Milan eastern edge, Segrate and Linate4.

4. Ambits The physical ambit relates to the places where the existing Wi-Fi environment is accessible – in both public and private sectors – and aims to lead towards a mapping process. Those places could be interpreted as ‘departure areas’ or ‘entrance areas’ to access the ambit of locative media.

The virtual ambit relates to virtual interaction with physical places within the social networks among which Foursquare is taken as example. Indeed, the relevance of such application with our discourse is the previously describe ‘check-in’ action, by which a virtual territory is being created by people who experience the physical space of the city: a meta terrain with relational network and communication infrastructure.

5. Actions I. Exploration The action has been realized within the physical context of the city where the existing private Wi-Fi environment has been explored through the two steps of ‘data capturing’ (I.a.), and ‘intensity contextualization’ (I.b.) processes5. The presence of Wi-Fi fields detected has been mapped according to their locations and varying intensity. Google MyTrack has been selected as tracking program and installed on a smartphone; the measurement unit is the Wi-Fi antenna of an iPod and the covered area includes the North-West entrance to Segrate from Cascina Gobba station, towards the central and eastern parts of the city, down through the Idroscalo and finally South-Western via Forlanini (as it can be seen in the images below).

The defined concept relates to the ongoing laboratory research. Due to the vastness of the area, this part of the experiment has been restricted to the central part of Segrate where there is the highest accumulation of inhabitants.

5 So far, nearly similar experiments of mapping Wi-Fi areas have actually been produced. Above all, it could be useful to cite the Salt Lake City Wi-Fi Map developed at Senseable City Lab, MIT. See Sevtsuk, A., Huang, S., Calabrese, F., & Ratti, C. (2008, in press). Mapping the MIT Campus in Real-time Using WiFi. In M. Foth (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. IGI Global, Pennsylvania, 2008.

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Figure 1. Data Capturing Process: traced path with captured points Figure 2. Data Capturing Process: traced path with captured points.

I.a. Data capturing process. This first step has been developed according to three modalities: 1. City-wide intensity reading. Strength signals have been captured at pre-defined places of interests, which are: Cascina Gobba, ‘cave’, the new and the old municipality offices, Aldo Rossi’s monument, Fontana Fontanile, FFSS train station, ponte Specchietti, Editrice Mondadori and Idroscalo (Figure 1).

2. Point-to-point intensity reading. Strength signals have been captured every of 100 meters and pinpointed with an interval of 500 meters. The area of interest covers mainly the central part of the city and continues towards the West and via Forlanini (Figure 2).

3. Idroscalo, on-field signal search. The area is dedicated to the Idroscalo and the intensity reading has been based on random data captured by the Wi-Fi antenna (Figure 2).

I.b. Intensity contextualization. In the second step, the captured data have processed basing on their intensity and illustrated in three-dimensional graphic. Grasshopper has been used as processing program and 3D Studio Max to generate the following illustrations.

By reviewing different technical information, it can reasonably be estimated that each Wi-Fi provider covers a spherical area with 50 meter long radius (Wi-Fi Alliance, eds., 2004;2003). Since we captured data ‘on’ the physical surface, the lower half of the spherical area has not been considered for the processing operation. Therefore, there were semi-spheres to be assumed as quantitative factor for the active Wi-Fi areas. The qualitative factor is the signals intensity which degrades from sphere center towards the outer surface, as shown below (Figure 3).

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Figure 3. The progressive screenshots of processing the captured data from abstract radius-based sphere to cloud with gradually decreasing field intensity.

After processing captured data based on intensity and covered areas, the resulted ‘dotted semi-spheres’ (Figure 3, lower right) had been integrated to each corresponding point. The following images (Figure 4 and 5), show the existing Wi-Fi environment of Segrate.

Figure 4. wi-fi covered areas of ‘city wide intensity reading’ Figure 5. wi-fi covered areas of ‘city wide intensity reading’.

II. Extraction This action occurs within the virtual ambit and is developed by localizing the checked-in ‘places’ by Foursquare users (Figure 6).

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Figure 6: Foursquare checked-in ‘places’ location for Segrate, with the indication of the municipal boundaries Figure 7. quali-quantitative map of urban dynamicity. The areas colored in blue represent the blurry dimension of this representation, since check-ins are possible in a certain range of distance from the registered ‘places’. The darker the shade, the highest the number of interactions. The first number under every location name is the relative number of check-ins ever made in the place; between the fences there is the number of users that have ever logged in it.

The aim is to extract physical places of interest in the virtual platform. The resulting quantitative information regarding the virtual accumulation of people in different place and (or, their meta-frequency) has then been represented in a quali-quantitative map where the names corresponding to the locations have been magnified in relation to the numbers of check-ins. As shown below, the resulting picture portrays a town whose most dynamic places of interaction between the physical and the virtual ambit are two private companies (IBM and Microsoft). The central station comes only after them, nearly followed by a steak house (Roadhouse Bisteccheria) and a supermarket (Esselunga), while all the other traditionally conceived public places have a much lower weight, according to the representation criteria (Figure 7).

III. Exam The final step is the superimposition of the first two and is meant to examine the public frequency in virtual ambit regarding the case study. As a first action, a comparison between the areas where check-ins occur and the previously mapped private Wi-Fi field density clearly reveals their complementarity (Figure 8). This can be easily explained in the central residential area, where the check-ins are mainly made in open or ‘public’ spaces, while the private Wi-Fi predominantly belongs to the residential blocks. Anyway, these data do not provide any information about the kind of connection Foursquare users hang onto to make their check-ins: is it by personal permanent Wi-Fi access provided by telephone companies through the satellite connections? Or is it by Wi-Fi public/free hotspots?

To answer this question, a map of the public Wi-Fi areas has been made with the information directly available on Segrate municipality website6, localizing open hotspots in two civic centers (Milano 2 and San Felice), two cascine (Commenda and Ovi) and two park areas (Area Eventi CentroParco and Parco degli Alpini) (Figure 9).

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http://www.comune.segrate.mi.it/benvenuti/aree_wireless/index.html [accessed April 28, 2013]

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The superimposition of the different layers makes allows to infer that, since the public hotspots are almost never even included in the ‘blue areas’ of Foursquare place influence, the mobile device handlers have been using their own (paid) Wi-Fi connection to make the check-ins.

Figure 8. comparison between the Foursquare checked-in areas (blue) and the private Wi-Fi field density (red).

Figure 9. public Wi-Fi areas (orange symbols) localization compared with the private ones and the position Foursquare ‘places’ (blue pins). There quite evidently is very minor matching.

6. Conclusions Many conclusions would be possible at this point.

First, the Figure 9 itself tells us about a town whose locative self-representation identifies as mostly important some definitely private places, while no Foursquare user has ever felt the need, the desire or simply any benefit in sharing their position in the places where the public Wi-Fi areas are. This could be ascribed both to the unattractiveness of those places – at least for the youngers –, or to some sort of ‘online hyperattractiveness’ of the private offices gaining those many logins.

Of course, the limits of this research are the limits of Foursquare, whose capability to represent the sense of belonging of the user to a territorial community is actually to be considered partial for different reasons: the age and cultural level of the users is still too centered in a small social group, and Foursquare itself has probably the strongest commercial attitude among the most used LBSNs. The research is, as a matter of fact, still in progress and the critical selection of tools itself is part of the experimentation.

Nevertheless, even with these strong softenings, the inquiry can be said to portray very clearly an unsatisfied need of free Wi-Fi connection at least into the central station area, which should be taken into consideration by the administration, thanks to this research. Therefore, a repeatable process can be imagined after this experimentation, in which the strategic positioning of public Wi-Fi areas could be decided after the construction of maps of the virtual use of the territories via location-aware media and social networks.

But, in a wider sense, the result of this research could help evaluating the accessibility degree of places and through the comparison between the existing Wi-Fi areas – the ‘departure areas’ – with the checked-in places, the level of their publicness could be examined. In other words, if a public space has been checked-in without public access to the global web, it could not be considered as fully public in today’s

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social lifestyle, since this new generation of ‘access rights’ should not be totally controlled and managed by private communication companies with business interests.

And, mostly, this inquiry helps in putting some new questions on the table.

How many virtual check-ins could have been done using the public access to the web? How many of city’s public spaces are multi-dimensionally accessible? Is it only the matter of lacking hot spots or there would be a theoretical problem related to these ‘meta-spaces’ which are effectively changing our ways of interaction with the urban spaces? Is the ‘good city form’ extending towards the virtual space? Can we integrate the virtual use and experience of physical space to the traditional indicators?

Figure 10. strategic scheme of the actions.

References Benn I., Gaus G. F., (1983), Public and private in social life, Taylor & Francis, Oxford.

Frampton, K., LeCuyer, A.W., (1999), Mega form As Urban Landscape, University of Michigan College.

Lynch, K., (1960), The Image of The City, M.I.T Press, Cambridge.

Lynch, K., (1976), What Time is This Place? The MIT Press, Cambridge.

Madanipour A., (eds., 2010), Whose public space?, Routledge, Abington-New York.

Pinto A. J., Remesar A., Brandão P., Nunes da Silva F., (2010), Planning public spaces networks towards urban cohesion. ISOCARP ‘Sustainable City / Developing World’ Congress, Nairobi.

Rossi, A., “La città analoga”, in Lotus, n.13, 1976.

Sui D., Goodchild M., (2011), “The convergence of GIS and social media: challenges for GIScience”, in International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 25:11, pp. 1737-1748.

Wi-Fi Alliance, (eds., 2004), WPA™ Deployment Guidelines for Public Access Wi-Fi Networks Wi-Fi Alliance, (eds., 2003), Securing Wi-Fi Wireless Networks with Today’s Technologies

Acknowledgments The ‘exploration phase’ had been developed in collaboration with arch. Luca Carizzoni, Between Physical and Virtual, October 2012.

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Google Street View Image of the Urban as Raw Material Cheryl R. Gilge University of Washington College of Built Environments, E-mail: cgilge@gmail.com

Google Street View presents the public realm as ‘fact’, mapped and documented, and reconstituted online.

The raw material of the urban realm is rendered as a fluid image, one that is both an object of study and a malleable medium in the users’ hands. Design disciplines and social scientists explore ways to facilitate research, from street audits to participatory planning. Artists seize the archive to produce creative works.

Cultural organizations utilize the platform to assess the changing city; superimposing historic photos against the modern day archive and produce virtual tours of historic districts. New media tools like GSV offer great potential to expand our understanding of the built environment, while posing clear dangers to knowledge production based on a representation. This paper complexifies the ways in which the urban representation mediates our practice and lived experience.

Keywords: Google Street View, knowledge, public realm

1. Introduction Google Street View (GSV) presents the public realm as ‘fact’, mapped and documented, and reconstituted online. The raw material of the urban fabric is rendered as a fluid photographic image, one that is both an object of study and a malleable medium in the hands of its users. Oscillating between fact and fiction, it simultaneously presents a stable archive and source of raw material from which to create. Design disciplines and social scientists explore ways to facilitate research, from street audits to participatory planning, while artists seize the archive to produce creative works. Cultural organizations present the changing city by superimposing historic photos against the modern day archive, while others produce virtual tours of city. New media tools like GSV offer great potential to expand our understanding of the built environment, while posing clear dangers to knowledge production based on a representation. This paper examines the role photography has played in relation to the built environment and complexifies the ways in which the urban representation mediates our practice and lived experience.

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2. Confluence of forces The photograph the result of the inscription of reflected light on a light-sensitive surface, the lens focal length and the framing of the view. It is within this formulation that photography is considered an ‘indexical document’, rendering the world in full. At the same time, it reveals its subjective and creative nature through framing and light manipulation. From the beginning, a discourse of competing photographic wills sought to establish it as faithful copy, and thereby ‘truth,’ as well as a creative tool for artists. Over time, the tool became increasingly identified with an artistic ‘vision’ that enabled artists to represent the world, one subjected to the subjective elements of composition. The photograph itself transcends disciplinary boundaries. The professional, amateur and hobbyist; the researcher, artist, journalist, parents; they all take pictures. It is a method of research, mode of communication, advertising tool; it bears witness, creative efforts, encapsulates memories. We have seen a dramatic transformation of the ‘photographic’ with the advancement of technology. As the digital supplants the analog, there has been a proliferation of the image in all aspects of life. With its ubiquity as an object and mode of representation, its materiality has diminished with the digital realm. With social media, Web 2.0 and smart phone technologies, we have seen the image move around the world with a speed and efficiency not possible in print; the viral nature and the electronic transmission has the ability to mobilize the masses at an unprecedented scale and speed.

The urban realm is the locus of contestation and a rich site of scholarship, deeply interdisciplinary in nature. It is the setting in which political, economic, social, cultural, racial, and spatial practices take place.

Its transference as an object of study evident as countless disciplines have recently focused their attention on the city. A host of interdisciplinary practices have coalesced around engaging its spatial organization.

Case studies examine urban forms to develop knowledge and best practices to ameliorate contemporary conditions, such as dependence on the automobile, decrease obesity, and mitigate social deviance and crime through community focus and daily practices. Citizen activism and volunteer mapping practices give agency to marginalized communities, and attempts to make structural conditions of economic and political forces visible in relation to purposive social acts that seek to wrest control away from top-down institutions for grass-roots change.

The built environment has long been the subject of photographs, a stable object on which to fix the camera lens. The first photograph by Niepce is from an upper-story window, the scene depicted is a portion of a building with open space in the distance. The viewer makes sense of the partial scene by mentally filling in the missing elements. They form an idea of the ‘whole’, based on what is represented; gestalt theory. An equally famous photograph by Daguerre is of a busy street scene. He improved upon the technique and technical apparatus, resulting in an image that had sharpness and clarity that Niepce’s lacked. While the exposure was dramatically shorter, it was still long enough that only stable objects were sharply rendered, save the figure in the lower left: a man receiving a shoeshine. The remaining scene appears devoid of inhabitants and life of the bustling environment. Since then, the built environment has been documented in countless ways, from formal documentation of tax assessment to street photography in various artistic styles. It is at this intersection of the urban as a site of contestation and the photograph as means of documentation that we can situate GSV in order to understand its widespread adoption as well as range of uses.

GSV is constructed from a series of photographs, stitched together to form a navigable view. Its method of capture is autonomous: the driver operates the car, the camera is on remote; algorithms construct the seamless view. Launched in 2007 with a limited US market, the mapped terrain has grown exponentially in subsequent years. It now encompasses country roads, distant lands like Antarctica, non-motorized environments like ski slopes, pedestrian trails, underwater terrain, the Amazon Basin as well as cultural institutions, global sites like Stonehenge to ‘local’ sites like the most recent site of the Super Bowl. The development of GSV emerges as a confluence of historical practices of navigation, travel, property survey and tax assessment in relation to a rapidly changing technological plane of online search. It stands less as a stroke of genius and more to moxie and cavalier attitude: to make the world’s information accessible and useful, including the world’s terrain.

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While the objective capture and its implementation have raised privacy concerns from a variety of sectors, there is also a resounding enthusiastic reception of it being a ‘helpful’ navigation tool. The average user utilizes GSV for anticipated uses and their curiosity extends to activities like verifying their residence and idiosyncratic artifacts therein, as well as other daily activities and paths traveled. It has been a boon to real estate and retail businesses, source of humor and sensationalism for many, and countless other users explore its potential and push its limits as a visual archive. While these uses often extend established practices, new media like GSV has engendered a fluidity between them, thus shifting the overall all plane of possibilities.

3. Malleable urban archive The urban environment is the content of much of the GSV platform, and thus serves as a ready backdrop and archive for many disciplines that take the urban realm as their object of study and point of engagement. We can see this at work in artistic projects, where artists like Robin Hewlett and Ben Kingsley sought to engage the community through a fictitious event, coordinated with Google. Their work previously engaged the public realm and the role of art, and GSV presented a new opportunity to render this practice in a unique way, one that is now part of the online archive. Artist Doug Rickard is a selftrained photographer with a sociology background. He was exploring different ways to express the economic disparity that was becoming increasingly apparent and exacerbated by the housing bubble of 2008. He stumbled upon GSV, and immediately saw its usefulness as a way to extract visual images that he himself would take, if he had the financial resources to make that possible. Rather, he proceeded to build a body of work of thousands of images, all taken from GSV, but visually framed according to his own aesthetic sensibilities and content.

Another mode of engagement with the urban realm takes place through tours. Urban tours are an informative way to learn about the city through the eyes of the local, one who often possesses knowledge not immediately accessible to the average person. A variety of tours have been conducted through use of GSV. As part of his radio show, James Howard Kunstler conducted tours of Paris, Baltimore and Detroit through use of the online interface. Listeners were able to see the same view that Kunstler was narrating from, regardless of time between the broadcast recording and the at-home listener. Conducted solely from GSV, Kunstler had the user pan and move through the environment while he narrated elements of the built environment, the viewer was able to synthesize the common tropes Kunstler discusses against the same image. A group of graduate students built a mobile app, Plottme, which allowed the user to build their own tours for mobile users. An online component mapped the tour onto GSV imagery, so one could take the tour, regardless of location. Similarly, the desire to make custom navigation routes through GSV has resulted in a new program by Teehan+Lax, Hyperlapse, which enables users to map a journey online and set the ‘pace’, resulting in a short customized video that presents GSV as its visual content. This follows from several DIY efforts exploring Stereoscopic imagery and other screen capture projects, like the extremely popular ‘Address is Approximate’ video. While many daily commutes have been mapped, the highly evocative promotional video of urban and rural roads reveals the potential of the tool, as well as the photogenic landscape of the natural and the urban, with a breathtaking tour of New York City’s urban canyon.

The Internet has produced a wide variety of online communities, and the new interactivity of Web 2.0 and Social Media has produced countless crowdsourcing projects. Given the richness of GSV as a visual archive and a movement toward citizen participation via 2.0, two crowdsourcing platforms, HistoryPin and WhatWasThere, have been developed as a way to build a dynamic visual history. Drawing from historical societies and individual photo archives, individuals upload photos and locate them within GSV. The end-user is able to move between present day images in GSV and the superimposed historical photos by shifting the transparency or hiding the image. In the process, they gain a better sense of the contextual changes that have transformed a place over time. The level of interaction with the user and the archive thus makes the learning process more transformative, rather than a physical process of comparison; at the same time, a global community participating in the construction of a history emerges.

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Cities and planning firms are finding creative ways to utilize social media and volunteered GIS to encourage citizen participation in the planning process. Project Fitzgerald and Beautiful Streets by OpenPlans.org are online interfaces that enable citizens to add comments to designated GSV images.

Fitzgerald is geared toward specific site interventions to collect pointed feedback, while Great Streets is a comparative tool that allows planners to expose citizens to images of other urban environments and generate a discussion for ways to improve their city. Both serve as a means to focus the discussion and enable city officials and design firms to communicate more effectively with citizens, while providing a user-friendly site of interaction for the user while overcoming public participation inertia.

Of all these examples, there is a wealth of productive potential as means to open up creative ways of thinking about existing problems. Creative practices offer affective experience with GSV; expanding our understanding of modes of navigation can increase both our curiosity of the world as well as deepen our understanding of the shift over time and over a larger urban area. Finding new ways to reach constituencies can greatly improve the benefits of participatory planning. These practices can provide a rich, additional layer of engaging the built environment, as either raw material or object of study. What is less clear is what some of the implications might be when we utilize the archive for knowledge production.

There are a variety of researchers and social scientists that have accessed the archive to assess whether this new tool might augment their research or make visible patterns of use/disorder that exist within the built environment. The Chicago School established the empirical practice of observing the public realm; in the 1970’s, the social sciences attempted to systemize this observation, establishing rules that permit replication across a variety of environments. In 1998, sociologist Robert J. Sampson experimented with video to determine whether SSO’s could be made more efficient by examining the physical record of the built environment instead of conducting on-site observations. Convincingly, the study illustrated that the video archive was no more biased than fieldwork conducted on foot; moreover, it built an archive from which to compare the neighborhood and any shift in its composition over time (Sampson, Robert J, and Stephen W. Raudenbush, 1999).

Researchers have cited this study by Sampson as justification for exploring the feasibility for using GSV as a tool to facilitate street audits1. Drawing the correlation between the video archive and the photographic online environment, these studies sought to demonstrate that GSV could be a cost effective tool to augment street audits. Street audits document physical attributes and are used for a variety of purposes, including assessing the health and walkability of the neighborhood and overall condition of the infrastructure. In each of the studies, an established physical audit tool was used to assess the GSV version of the environment. In all cases, a slight modification was required to make the tool appropriate for the virtual realm, as some of the qualitative factors that are not measurable, such as street noise, pedestrian activity, traffic speeds, etc.

In nearly all of the studies, there was a high or near perfect concordance with many of the larger, stable elements of the streetscape, such as sidewalks or traffic signals. Ephemeral elements or smaller objects like graffiti or street furniture exhibited a lower concordance. Graffiti or the presence of litter changes over time, while smaller objects like street furniture or window boxes are more difficult to discern from the viewing angle of GSV; sidewalk widths and conditions are equally difficult to assess. From a cost saving perspective, four of the five studies reported time savings when conducting the audit. In most instances, 1

The following studies are referenced: Badland H.M, et. al. (2010) “Can Virtual Streetscape Audits Reliably Replace Physical Streetscape Audits?” Urban Health Journal of Urban Health 87 (6): 1007–1016.

Odgers, Candice L, et. al. (2012) “Systematic Social Observation of Children’s Neighborhoods Using Google Street View: A Reliable and Cost-Effective Method.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 53 (10): 1009–1017.

Rundle, Andrew G., et. al. (2011) “Using Google Street View to Audit Neighborhood Environments.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 40 (1) (January): 94–100.

Taylor, B.T, et. al. 2011. “Measuring the Quality of Public Open Space Using Google Earth.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 40 (2): 105–112.

Wilson, J.S, et. al. 2012. “Assessing the Built Environment Using Omnidirectional Imagery.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 42 (2): 193–199.

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the savings resulted from travel time to and from sites, rather than actual time saved conducting observations. In the Wilson study, they reported an increase in time to conduct the virtual audit. Of all the studies, however, the Wilson study reported the highest level of concordance, which suggests additional time spent studying the virtual representation may yield more accurate results.

But what of its limitations? Each study reported the uncertainty of time/data stamp as a potential factor for impacting meaningful results. Without knowing the age of the capture, the accuracy of the audit is questionable. The temporal variations over the course of a day or even the year reveal different streetscapes. Google often captures urban streets when traffic is at a minimum, either early morning or early evening, and the resulting capture may not accurately portray the street environment, such as traffic or pedestrian activity. Given its static visual quality, many of the more qualitative elements are not conveyed, such as the street noise, frequency of pedestrian activity, the smells of the neighborhood, etc.

While some of these elements are temporal or ephemeral, a physical audit of a street scene traditionally includes several 10-minute pedestrian counts, indicates the presence of street vendors, and the sound quality of the overall environment. In all instances, this generally provides a significant assessment of the overall street character.

Despite these limitations, each study concluded that the level of accuracy made the use of GSV an important cost-saving tool to be incorporated into a larger study, especially during research design, when larger areas may be assessed at the block level with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Its particular strength allows researchers to compare a variety of environments in quick succession, which can be important when assessing other urban environments in order to improve local conditions by implementing elements from other successful urban contexts. While GSV might provide a mostly accurate assessment of the built condition, at best it represents an approximation from which to begin to conduct research. Given the stability of the larger elements, this approximation may be mostly accurate. But as we all know, the quality of the urban environment cannot be reduced to numbers of elements that are counted. The qualitative layer might shift an understanding of the actual health of the neighborhood, as opposed to the physical appearance that contradicts behaviors. In other words, there may be sidewalks, but it doesn’t mean there is anywhere to walk to, or that residents feel safe to use them, or it might just be the street furniture or window boxes that give a street a quality worth preserving. An approximation should not suffice. It is a slippery slope, those ‘levels’ of concordance.

4. Inconclusively, contingency These two early photographs simultaneously point to the photograph as faithful copy and the subjective nature of the medium. On the one hand, we also see a relatively ‘unmediated’ representation of that which was placed before the lens at a particular moment in time. Not subject to the ‘talent’ of the draughtsman, its form and shape rendered accurately by light. On the other hand, we see how the passage of time records only certain elements. We see the ability of the camera to edit out information, purposefully or accidentally. The viewer makes assumptions about what is not there, drawing from their own horizon of meaning and the context of the photograph itself. Contingency and time-lapse affect the way in which we understand the image. We are confronted with an otherwise empty street scene, and it is only through the narrative process that we become aware of how it might have looked were the exposure shorter or horse drawn carriage a bit more idle.

Returning to GSV, there are countless users who seize this new visual archive, pushing the limit to see what it can do. It is precisely at this point that the richness the platform offers reveals itself, malleable in the hands of the user. The user turns producer, DIY and advertisements compete for inventive uses, Google partners with cultural movers in ‘chrome’ experiments; each effort expands the field. When we consider the visual platform of Google Street View in light of the reality of the photograph, it might give one pause when viewing the image of a street scene, a faithful representation at one point of time. Does it seem brimming with optimism? Despair? It might have been lens quality, it might have been fall or spring.

Was it trash day? Was it just before gentrification? Before ‘that family’ (and the drug clientele) moved in down the street. What makes us so certain? How can we read the image? How are we to conduct research

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with this tool? At what point does a faithful copy, objectively captured, turn subjective material for expression and entertainment? The photograph thus stands as an approximation of an index, a truthful representation of a particular moment in time, taken with with a particular apparatus under particular light conditions, framed under particular circumstances. It could have been many other instances, lighting conditions, or circumstances. The photograph is only contingency. The ineffable, frozen in time.

References Badland H.M, et. al., (2010), “Can Virtual Streetscape Audits Reliably Replace Physical Streetscape Audits?” Urban Health Journal of Urban Health 87 (6): 1007–1016.

Odgers, Candice L, et. al., (2012), “Systematic Social Observation of Children’s Neighborhoods Using Google Street View: A Reliable and Cost-Effective Method.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 53 (10): 1009–1017.

Rundle, Andrew G., et. al., (2011), “Using Google Street View to Audit Neighborhood Environments.”

American Journal of Preventive Medicine 40 (1) (January): 94–100.

Sampson, Robert J, and Stephen W. Raudenbush, (1999), “Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods.” The American Journal of Sociology 105 (3): 603–651.

Taylor, B.T, et. al., (2011), “Measuring the Quality of Public Open Space Using Google Earth.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 40 (2): 105–112.

Wilson, J.S, et. al., (2012), “Assessing the Built Environment Using Omnidirectional Imagery.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 42 (2): 193–199.

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Text - space dynamics The digital media in defining new urban languages Giulio Lughi University of Turin Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning.

The paper outlines, from the point of view of cultural and media studies, how digital media can be taken as a key to approach the understanding of new urban languages, as they introduce new dynamics in the text-space relationship: as a matter of fact, in digital media "texts become spaces", as they become viable (eg in hypertexts and video games); and - on the other side - "spaces become texts", as they become readable and writable (eg in procedures for geotagging and in many other cases).

The paper focuses on the text-space dynamics, taking into account some theoretical points regarded as paradigms of how the perception and representation of social space are changing in the digital media landscape: the mobile/locative paradigm; ubiquitous computing and the internet of things; open data and interoperability; pervasive gaming; social tagging and partecipation. keywords: digital media; text; space

1. Introduction From the point of view of cultural and media studies, digital media can be taken as a key to approach the understanding of new urban languages, as they introduce new dynamics in the text / space relationship: as a matter of fact, in digital media "texts become spaces", as they become viable (eg in hypertexts and video games); and - on the other side - "spaces become texts", as they become readable and writable (eg in media walls and in geotagging).

So, in this paper, when we talk about "new urban languages" we mean that the city - thanks to the digital network infrastructure - have become a semiotic space where the experience of living and going around is very similar to the experience of reading / writing, or to the experience of watching a show / acting in theatre, and more generally to the experience of being a user of the media.

Consciously or unconsciously, the modern fl창neur equipped with mobile phone, who moves in the urban space, continuously reads the spectacular performances of the media walls; or activates the intriguing perspectives offered by augmented reality; anyway he writes digital traces of his passage, which will be read by the tracking systems and data mining systems, creating the powerful underground structure of data and information that binds producers, consumers, digital media and the urban space into a single complex network.

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The relationship between text and space obviously does not concern only the digital media: it was born in ancient times with the birth of writing (Ong W., 1982), and thus with the transposition of the temporal flow of speech in the delimited space of the page, thereby starting the close relationship between written code and iconic code which characterizes our cultural transmission processes.

A relationship that was strengthened with the invention of printing, when the spatial organization of the text became even more rigid, and when the first mechanical and technological applications for the transmission of culture - in order to control the textual spatiality - were carried out on both planes, of written and iconic text: with movable type print on the one hand; and with devices for the reproduction of perspective on the other.

Later, at the beginning of the industrial age, the relationship between cultural processes and urban spaces become institutional: since its foundation, sociology as a science has been closely related to the theme of the city (Gamba F., 2009), especially with regards to the social and cultural changes that urbanization brings in people's lives. Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903), talks about a "tragedy of culture", the contradiction experienced by the inhabitants of the city between their own individuality and the multiplicity of urban forms. Max Weber (Economy and Society, 1921) talks about "disenchantment" as a characteristic feature of modernity, as the loss of the emotional, spiritual and mythical culture, absent in the urban space dominated by bureaucratization, mechanization, rationalization.

Somehow, starting from these premises, the age of mass media has gradually produced a negative interpretation of the text / space relationship, insisting on the concepts of de-localisation, deterritorialisation, de-spatialization, etc., as founding characteristics of “mass media culture” (Meyrowitz J., 1985). And later, at the beginning of digital media age, the prevailing idea of delocalisation was subsequently extended — as if driven by inertia — also to the “digital media culture”: extension probably due to the fact that most of the debate was centred on a high visibility phenomenon (academic, industrial, emotional, mediatic, etc.) such as Virtual Reality and its presumed distance from “real” reality.

Today, a more mature theory of digital media has activated a partial revision of this position, and has gone on to a revaluation of space, guided generally by the consolidation of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and the pervasiveness of the network as a communication environment, and more specifically by: • the rise of interactivity in digital media, that means the ability to act on a text as a practicable space; • the enormous development of mobile devices and, therefore, the birth of a scenery naturally placed within a spatial dynamic; • the growing importance of gamification; • the general growth of visual culture and data spectacularization; • the diffusion of social networks as places of meetings and exchanges of experiences.

A set of five theoretical paradigms, based on relations between space / text / technology, which represent now a proposal for reasoning on new urban languages.

2. Digital media and interactivity Digital media are the transposition of the technical, professional, emotional, cultural world of mass media into the new technological environment offered by the rise of ICT. In this transposition, the key elements that characterizes the digital media is the distinction between two different levels: • the surface structure: the place - on computer or tablet screens - that offers a view apparently similar to what we are used to seeing on paper, film and television; • the deep structure: the place - consisting of hardware and software - where the digital information is processed and made perceptible to the human senses; the deep structure is a logic engine, based on the underlying database and algorithms, which performs calculations on abstract entities, but which is able to generate any kind of spectacular effects in the surface structure.

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Thanks to the difference between surface and deep structure, the main characteristic of digital media is the interactivity. That means that the text becomes able to receive an input, perform calculations, and return an output: in other words the text - which was only visibile until then - in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century becomes practicable, accessible. This transformation of the textual space from visible space to viable, playable space represents the decisive turning point as opposed to the previous mass media age.

This turning point was mostly achieved through the two dominant paradigms in cultural digital text: hypertext and immersive 3D graphics; the first one mostly tied to the world of writing; the second one to the visual world; but they are both destined to flow into ever more convergent interactive multimedia forms.

In particular, Manovich (Manovich L., 2000) emphasizes the difference between the traditional paradigm of media representation (where the relationship between observer and observed is static) and the new paradigm of simulation (where the observer moves within the observed space): a real construction of space as a mediated text, permitted by 3D graphics.

However, Manovich still talks about a user / reader / spectator who is sitting in front of a computer; whereas the first decade of the Twenty-First Century represents the phase of mass diffusion of mobile communication devices (mobile phones, smart phones, portable consoles, media players, e-book players, tablets).

3. The "mobile / locative" paradigm In order to place the mobile / locative paradigm in digital media age, Manuel Castells’s theory (Castells M., et al., 2007) is very important for its many references to the urban organization. Castells's theory highlights three concepts: • the information society: the awareness that the social and cultural life is governed today by the exchange of information rather than by the movement of goods and people; • the space of flows: the technological network that supports and integrates the physical space, within which social relationships can grow and develop; • the global city: intended as a the infrastructure of a technological, emotional and cultural space, within which people can recognize themselves as world citizens.

With the diffusion of mobile communication devices, this paradigm develops ever more. Locative media are communication systems that use specific location based technologies in order to give life to significant spatial and temporal relationships between people, groups and institutions: recovering strong connections with local realities, creating shared representations of the surrounding territory, becoming a link between physical reality and the internet.

A profound scenery change has occurred, where - through information technologies - new forms of embodiment are springing up, reflecting both a physical presence in the world and a social embedding in a web of practices and purposes, transferring the realm of virtuality to the realm of everyday experience.

This paradigm shift is determined by the development of the ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) (Dourish P., Bell G., 2011): it gradually gets rid of the old desktop computer, to make room for sensors and microcomputers which, associated with an object, can be unequivocally identified and gather information in real time and in real space.

After all, the Internet of things is a mediated space, since it is an area where are located, installed and wired many things that are not just objects but also activators, receptors and transmitters, input and output devices: in other words, communication tools that transform the physical space in a text area.

The miniaturization of electronic devices takes possession of the space, transform the world around us in a sort of "liquid Internet", completely different from the the world of bulky desktop computer: the liquid Internet is the wireless connection of micro objects, barely visible and scattered everywhere, as a communicative powder (smart dust) on which is based the semiotic environment of new urban languages (Sterling B., 2005).

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4. Gamification and pervasive gaming The importance of the ludic dimension has emerged more and more in contemporary culture: the ludic dimension has progressively lost its negative connotation, acquiring instead a central position in the sociocultural dynamics and remodelling the concepts of loisir, free time, consumption (cultural and non cultural) (Pecchinenda G., 2004). The connection between space and games is physiologic, in the sense that in motion games and street games, as in many sports, the game allows the player to take control over space and territory, involving the creation of behavioral models and the appropriation of external reality.

In this sense, all classic videogames (ability games, adventure games, simulation games, etc.) represent some forms of control over space: over the game space, where the adventure takes place; and over the player space, mostly with the extension to the net, and the diffusion of multiplayer games.

Nintendo Wii must be mentioned relating to consoles. It based its success on the introduction of the dimension of space: not in the text, but outside it. The Wii, by extending the remote control and mouse potential out of the screen, introduced a homology between text and space that well represents - on a symbolic level - the topic we are discussing about. In the Wii, in fact, the movements of body, arms and legs are read in the real space and reproduced on the screen, immediately becoming a feedback for the player.

In fact, the player who moves in the physical space writes precise instructions on the text controlling the game (the deep structure); this text in turn writes, or better projects, onto the screen a visual text (the surface structure) that suggests to the human device (the player) how s/he must act.

But from our point of view, the most interesting phenomenon in gamification are now the pervasive games, an umbrella term for a wide range of situations: location-based game, location-enabled game, location-aware games, augmented reality games, alternate reality game, etc. Pervasive games are played using a mobile device, that means: a) the localization of the player; b) the opportunity to interact with other players in the surrounding area, by phone or meeting them physically. As can be seen, the pervasive games are a very complex but interesting example of social discourses constructed in the urban environment, since they involve the use of communication technology, the geographical knowledge of the environment, the geolocation, the willingness to communicate with strangers, the use of leisure time for entertainment but also for knowledge.

5. Visual culture and data spectacularization The development of visual culture offers important opportunities for developing fascinating hypotheses for the identification of new urban languages, especially taking into account the assets of open / big data which represent a huge resource of knowledge offered by ICT (Rosenfeld L., Morville P., 2002).

The management of the open / big data opens up great possibilities to invent new forms of monitoring and data collection (relating to the environment, mobility and welfare, but also to the cultural habits and leisure time activities) using advanced sensors technologies and ubicomp. The management of the open / big data allows to work on formats and protocols in order to achieve interoperability and cross-media, but also to work on the aesthetics of the data publishing form1.

In this way, we can get spectacular forms of data streams that cross the city without interruption and enter into cognitive and emotional habits of smart people, creating advanced forms of evolved touristic services, where digital technology may support complex information infrastructures for cultural heritage re-use, event management, local mobility strategies, enhancement of the traditions and local products (Ekman U., ed., 2012).

For instance, Real Time Rome is a pilot project born from the collaboration of the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)2 with Telecom Italy, presented at the Biennale of Architecture in Venice in 2006. In an effort to understand the configurations of everyday life in Rome, the project: uses mobile devices (cell phones and GPS receivers) as position sensors, assigned in a capillary way to the citizens; allows the collection of information to a maximum level of detail (the individual); 1 2

http://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2012/06/25/in-screen-sports-graphics.html http://senseable.mit.edu/urbancode/

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through the development of appropriate software for statistical processing and data display, gives an extremely precise real-time flows of the population in urban space.

6. Social networks as media spaces After the decline of Second Life, where the overlap between real life and virtual life was realized within a space clearly recognizable as a physical environment, current social networks are rapidly evolving towards complex forms of identity creation (in Facebook you are generally yourself, the adoption of an avatar is second choice); a sort of virtual meeting place, where identity creation is based on an accurate dosing of personal text and messages adding quotes taken from other mediatic forms (literary, musical, iconographic, cinematographic).

In Facebook it is very frequent the use of Flickr, YouTube or other mediatic repositories as databases in order to create the messages: a way to create a platform space, in juxtaposition to - or overlapping with - the space of flows identified by Manuel Castells as a typical example of informationalism.

Overall, the physical presence and the socio-spatial-temporal location of people - when they are communicating - becomes increasingly important: this depends on the mobile / locative paradigm, within which they can develop new forms of creativity (Beardon C., Malmborg L., 2010), characterized by a fundamental difference compared to "sedentary" creativity (usually leading to the creation of a work). To activate the mobile / locative creativity implies necessarily to take into account the contexts of use, where and how users will be placed, such as in pervasive games, or in urban tagging experiments as the "walk show" organized by Urban Experience in Rome3.

In these cases, it is important to understand the "spectacle of the city", not to act a show in the streets of the city; read and write an event self-promoted via social networks convocations, supported by the use of bluetooth, mobtag, mobile applications, geoblog mapped and tracked via GPS.

7. Conclusions In contemporary cities, the mass media come out of their specific channels in order to take hold of the urban areas, in order to use the urban environment as a projection screen (Arcagni S., 2012), as in the visionary imagination of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), but now with the addition of augmented reality4.

The ambivalence of augmented reality, his being inside and outside at the same time, fits well with the central assumption of this paper: the text becoming a space, the space becoming a text. A good example of this ambivalence is the Museion in Bolzano-Bozen5, a contemporary art museum with a special, huge Media Wall that acts as an interface between the outside and the inside, between the art and the city, between the culture and nature: technology as intermediary between institution and everyday life.

An ambivalence that is also found in many symbolic characters that modernity – and postmodernity - of media has presented to us, with an uncertain statute and a borderline collocation: firstly the flâneur, but then the surfer, the wreader (writer-reader), the spectactor (spectator-actor), the prosumer (producer-consumer).

Probably we can assume also the smartphone as a symbolic gadget of this ambivalence, of the complex dynamic between text and space: thanks to the smartphone, people become writers (for example when put tags on places by associating them to some fragments of her own life); at the same time, people are written in a metanarrative that derives from their being present and geo-localized in the places, and from the uninterrupted exchange of data (in input and output) caused just by the fact of having the phone turned on.

To accept this ambivalence is perhaps the right way to tackle the complex relationship between text and space: and the ways in which this relationship is structured (interactivity, locative distribution of media 3

http://www.urbanexperience.it/groups/format-di-performing-media-per-lurban-experience/forum/topic/walk-show/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6c1STmvNJc 5 http://www.museion.it/?page_id=11889 4

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contents, gamification, spectacularization of data, social dynamics in virtual /physical places) are perhaps the right way to understand the dynamics of our everyday life in mediated city, and can be used as the basis to discuss a possible definition of new urban languages.

References Arcagni S., (2012), Screen City, Bulzoni, Roma Beardon C., Malmborg L., (2010), Digital Creativity. A Reader, Routledge, New York NY. Castells M., et al., (2007), Mobile Communication and Society. A Global Perspective, Massachusetts Institutes of Technology.

Dourish P., Bell G., (2011), Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Ekman U., ed., (2012), Throughout. Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Gamba F., (2009), Leggere la cittĂ . Indizi di contaminazioni sociologiche, Liguori, Napoli.

Manovich L., (2000), The Language of new media, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Meyrowitz J., (1985), No Sense of Place, Oxford University Press, Oxford - New York NY. Ong W., (1982), Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, Methuen, London - New York NY. Pecchinenda G., (2004), Videogiochi e cultura della simulazione. La nascita dell'homo game, Laterza, Bari-Roma.

Rosenfeld L., Morville P., (2002), Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol CA. Sterling B., (2005), Shaping Things, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

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Smart Urbanization Emerging Paradigms of Sensing and Managing Urban Systems Venkata Krishna Kumar Matturi Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge.

E-mail: vmatturi@gsd.harvard.edu

Proliferation of communication and mobile technologies in recent years had led to the open availability of massive data in how we are ‘connected’. Discourse of smart cities, developed through integration of this stored and real time data has made useful contributions to the management of traditional urban infrastructure including water, energy, transportation and other urban systems. However, the increasing role of data analytics corporations in urban management focusing on efficiency have only resulted in fragmented approaches highlighted by individual definitions of ‘sustainability’ in cities. This research explores the historical development of these systems, especially corporations’, through the lens of three key components of technological, ecological and socio-cultural patterns and their integration; and provides a provisional framework for smarter urbanization and its management.

Keywords: Smart Cities, Urban Management, Urban Systems

1. Introduction The defining role played by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in how cities communicate and learn has been a much debated issue for the past couple of decades (Castells M., 1989; McFarlane C., 2011). Ever since the introduction of the first website of the CERN in 1991 by Berners-Lee on a NeXT computer, the Internet has been redefining how we live in today’s society. The pervasiveness of computing in everyday lives has also come to the forefront of how cities are functioning, especially in governance and management of city systems (McFarlane C., 2011; Cuff D., 2003). This phenomenon is at the core of emerging theories of Intelligent Cities and Smart(er) Cities. Although the concept of smart cities is a subject of debate (Campbell T., 2012; Komninos N., 2008), the number of cities rebranding as Smart has been growing in recent years. Along with provisions for basic human needs like water, waste and energy, cities are increasingly placing a larger emphasis on e-governance to keep up with the digital revolution (Dawes S. S., 2009). This revolution has had profound implications on how institutions and organizations gather behavioral data from users. As more users share information about their daily lives, both knowingly and unknowingly, the role of data analytic corporations has become of paramount importance in both storing and utilization of data. It is indeed obvious that the massive technological transformation that took place at the turn of the 20th century is having profound implications on how we

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manage our cities. However, it has equally allowed the transformation of trans-national corporations into urban management through a technologically deterministic, efficiency agenda, which is the focus of this paper. The investigation will trace technological innovations in the fields of computing and analytics fueling advancements in sensing and managing urban systems.

2. ‘Smart Cities’ or Being Smart in Cities?

The idea of looking at cities through a lens centered on information has been around for few decades now as technological advancements in the fields of computing and data transfer have facilitated the proliferation of Internet and rapid information exchange [1]. This restructuring has contributed to the suppression of traditionally power holding organization deeply rooted in the notion of place and space according to Castells (1989; Castells M., 1996). The recent upward trend in labeling ‘Smart Cities’ or ‘Intelligent Cities’, however, is a functional derivative of mobile computing and handheld devices emerging as primary tools for rapidly transferring information. Nevertheless, there is no clear consensus on what constitutes a smart city. European Smart Cities (smart-cities.eu) characterizes a smart city as “a city well performing in 6 characteristics, built on the ‘smart’ combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent and aware citizens;” these characteristics being Smart Economy, Smart Mobility, Smart Environment, Smart People, Smart Living, and Smart Governance1. Whereas the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) classifies smart(er) cities as those “putting in place best practices, test new innovative new programs, passing model legislation, etc., in sustainability factors: Municipal Energy; Transportation; Water; Green Building; Smart Growth; Environmental Justice; Waste Prevention; Food Security; Air Quality; Green Space; Standard of Living”2. Despite being a loosely connected milieu, the idea of smart cities has inadvertently allowed corporations to take an active part in urban environments with the goal of inducing smarter technologies into everyday systems.

This new wave of pressure for cities to become smarter through technological innovations set forth by data analyst corporations like IBM, Siemens, and Cisco have certainly resonated in cities around the world.

This is evidenced in the recent surge of cities rebranding themselves as smart or through their unveiling of ambitious plans that aim to create a smart(er) city, centered on ICTs (Deakin M., Waer H. A., 2012).

Graham (2002) argues that these attempts are merely different versions of business-dominated industrial capital production, only replaced by technological products (Graham S., 2002). Whereas Hollands (2008), posits the difficulties with the definitions as well as the techno-centric ideologies of cities in economic regeneration (Hollands R. G., 2011). The arguments here only suggest the opportunities that emerged from this transformation allowing technology firms like IBM to commodify information gathering and analysis in urban areas. Some of the preconditions for this can be traced to commercialization of spatial data (Lee M., 2010) during the later parts of 20th century.

Through convergence of material and information flows, cities have always provided the perfect breeding grounds for innovative technologies and opportunities for deploying them. By nature, cities are smart based on their ability to adapt. Perlman in 1987 argued the inventions of steel, elevators, indoor plumbing, electricity, the automobile, the subway and the telephone almost a century earlier had shaped cities throughout 20th century (Perlman J. E., 1987). Today, cities are increasingly shaped by the modern inventions of mobile computing and web based technologies through crowd sourcing information and financial flows. Through these powerful technologies we are able to understand, analyze and better manage resources and services provided to the citizens. Glaesser (2011) notes that the modern society is becoming more adept at utilization of tools at its disposal to address the challenges of energy, mobility and other essential urban systems - in other words, smarter (Glaeser E., 2011).

1 2

European Smart Cities (n.d). Retrieved May 02, 2013, from http://www.smart-cities.eu/model What are Smarter Cities? (NRDC) (2013). Retrieved May 02, 2013, from http://smartercities.nrdc.org/about

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Figure 1. Large Corporations with diverse expertise have developed their own versions of smart programs. Source: Author

The foray of Trans-national organizations into urban systems management is contributing to cities’ functional structures through e-governance with hopes of ‘better’ decision making and ‘efficient’ functioning. This means of efficiency in the governing process is being labeled as smart and form the core theoretical underpinnings of business models of Smart Cities of IBM, Cisco, Accenture, Siemens and other large IT consultancies (Figure 1). IBM, a trans-national technology firm, has restructured itself into a consulting firm for managing urban systems through its ‘Smart’ programs in 2008 (Dirks S., and Keeling M.. 2008). Insofar, the company saw a net increase of 25% in revenue from its ‘Smarter Planet’ programs in 2012 from previous year (IBM, 2012). As the first IT organization to extend its services into urban management, IBM’s transformation story provides a prudent example of the trajectory of technological advancements in data gathering, sensing, mapping, and image processing that have influenced the urban realm.

3. Punch cards to smart cards The year of 2011 marked a momentous occasion for IBM. From its inception in 1911, formally as Computing Tabulating and Recording Company (CTR), its century long odyssey is considered by many an epitome of innovation and success in the fields of technology. Big Blue, as it is so often called, was a pure technology company until the turn of the 21st century. Its contributions in the fields of computing, including modern electronics, personal computers, storage, and integrated defense systems, ran parallel to the golden period of computing in the later parts of 20th century. IBM diversified its portfolio into services, outsourcing and software during a financially tumultuous late 1990s. It further transformed itself into a services and analytics provider during the first decade of the 21st century. Tracing the development of modern computers is an arduous task and not the intent of this research. Computers have influenced modern society in almost every imaginable way possible. However, a look into IBM’s transformation

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provides not only a historical development of technological systems but also the reconfiguration of a computer services company into an urban management services provider and allows for a deeper understanding of evolving technologies that effected urbanization and its management.

In so many ways IBM’s venture of Smarter Planet is a table setting and industry leading one. Never before has a technology company as large as IBM invested in a strategy that deals directly with urban issues.

However, a careful analysis indicates that IBM’s trajectory in development of technological systems has always been connected to urban systems management, right from its first but extremely successful offering of the punch card system to recent smart data centers. The earlier version of punch cards that could record data and be read by a machine was invented by Herman Hollerith in 1889. This was extensively used in 1890 U.S. Census, the first instance of processing large urban data (Pugh E. W., 1996). Hollerith’s company Tabulating Machine Company, merging with three other companies, later became CTR (renamed as IBM). IBM built a variety of earlier machines that would record, sort, and tabulate punch card information. For the next sixty years punch cards, also known as IBM Cards, were heavily used in every industry. In short, the memory of punch cards made the scale of modern corporation possible (Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., 2011).

The ideas of economy and efficiency have been the driving forces behind most technology companies.

The success of the IBM card has led to many innovations in the field of data storage and computing. The pressure to pack more data into less space inadvertently led to development of magnetic tapes (IBM 2401). The next big innovation came in terms of accessing the data through magnetic disks RAMAC (ancestors to today’s RAM and hard disks). While punch cards had three mechanical functions of entering, storing and counting data, the need for better computation systems expanded that idea to integrate sensing, memory, processing, logic, connecting and architecture of complex systems (Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., 2011). This categorization and evolving systemic thinking has helped immensely in learning and analyzing urban data in the same vein as workings of a large organization or an industry.

Earlier versions of devices like electric type writing machines (Selectric) acted as input devices that later advanced into keyboards, facilitating entering data faster. The development of barcodes was particularly crucial in managing the inventory of goods. Universal Product Code (UPC), developed by IBM, turned out to be one of most profound contributions to industrial technology (Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., 2011). UPC not only changed how inventory is managed in industries but also contributed immensely to systems of ticketing (mobility), medicine and a variety of different fields where scanning information is needed, making it one of the earliest system of smart nature. IBM’s magnetic stripes and UPC technology also contributed to further development of smart cards in circulation today.

The need for processing stored data led to the development of vacuum tubes, ancestors to computing devices. During 1970s, IBM’s drive to build microprocessors reshaped high-performance computing (Pugh E. W., 1996; Ceruzzi P. E., 2003). However, the peripheral implications of development in processing power contributed immensely to the fields of image and speech recognition. The advancements in image processing were profound in development of cartography, aerial imagery, and remote sensing that allowed better understanding of urbanization patterns. However, this was not as straightforward as it required innovations in optical character recognition, computer tomography, and remote sensing for satellite and military intelligence in 1960’s. IBM’s computers were again instrumental, helping early satellites gather much needed data and to analyze it (Pugh E. W., 1996; Hughes A. C., and Hughes T. P., 2000). The 1970’s saw improvements in the ability to analyze large amounts of data embedded in images which led to the availability of number of digital image processing software in 1980’s (Pugh E. W., 1996; Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., 2011). Early 1990’s scanning for similar faces in the folder of images and developments in image recognition continue to advance today, not only recognizing patterns, but also in the ability to communicate with images through augmented reality and holographic projections. The final decades of the 20th century saw the rise of desktop computing and data analysis tools along with growth in internet usage. Computers became more capable of handling large data sets generated every day at point-of-sale (POS), industrial outputs, manufacturing, mobility and payrolls.

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Individual software programs, increasingly becoming relics of this era, also played a major role in proliferating desktop computers.

Advancements in computing and data processing capabilities have allowed large organizations to achieve manufacturing and functional efficiencies (Cambell-Kelly M., 2003) in pursuit of increased capital production. The transformation to web-based technologies and mobile computing has certainly changed the way we traditionally communicate. In a relative measure, the change has been rapid towards the proliferation of handheld devices. Perhaps the most intriguing part of this development is the sensors that each of these devices carry, collecting data about user location and behaviors. The information stored and sent over these devices and websites spurred a Big Data revolution from the beginnings of 21st century.

McKinsey report on Big Data projects a 40% growth in data per year compared to a mere 5% growth in IT spending (MGI, 2011). On the other hand, the projected market for ‘smart’ systems is a staggering $ 57 billion U.S dollars by 2014.

4. Is ‘Smart’ the New ‘Sustainable’?

It is clear from the literature, the discourse of smart cities is centered on information exchanges and ICTs (Hollands R. G., 2011; Komninos N., 2008; Deakin M., Waer H. A., 2012; Mitchell W. J., 1999). A deeper look, however, reveals the discourse’s proclivity towards statistical measurability; in other words, data. A clear emphasis is on population data, especially urban population data and the challenge of accommodating the needs of a growing population. Mitchell (1999), first floating the idea of smart cities, proposed the city as the place where the information (byte sized) comes together, transforming the neighborhoods and work places. This transformation of modern cities comes through processing the data produced within these neighborhoods and workplaces. With the increase in data generated per person every day through sensors carried around in the form of mobile phones and data gathered through social media applications, companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple know more about the behavior of users than the users themselves (Lee M., 2010). Getting to work quicker, finding locations of preferred food, finding goods closest to the user etc. have become a common offering in mobile applications. Buildings now don smart systems that respond to the users’ needs, automobiles communicate with each other and plethora of everyday machines are equipped with electronic sensors to reduce human interference and maximize the efficiency. This transformation to embedded systems especially in consumer electronics is only a logical progression from the previous decade’s advancements in software industry.

Just as the emphasis of smart systems with embedded electronics that process information is growing through the proliferation of web-based mobile applications, during this decade, the emphasis was on ‘sustainability’ in every aspect of life (business, economics, environment) throughout the last decade. The more it became main stream and commodified, the more it became confusing as to what constitutes ‘sustainability’. Inconsistent ratings systems that measure carbon footprints to material usage have become widespread. However, the notion of sustainability for large corporations that have visible impact on everyday life was something quite different. Reducing the resource usage to manufacture efficient products was the mantra. Every product and service in every sector of the economy is transformed by new parameters such as quiet, healthy, efficient, and environmentally-friendly through increasing expectations by consumers, investors, employees, and other constituents of the business (Laszlo, C., Zhexembayeva, N., 2011). The cheaper the electronics became, the cheaper it is for products to embed them making smart the prevalent notion of the decade. The notion of smart is commodified just as the notion of sustainability, becoming more of a fragmented ideology suffering from the same imperfections.

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5. Is Smart Urbanization Possible?

Just as the technological breakthroughs before, mobile computing and web-based applications are indeed a natural progression and allow us to attain higher levels of efficiency in material consumption and work outputs. As before, the dominance of organization and capitalistic forces at governance are quiet obvious.

Organizations like Google claim that the future of computing and services are customized around the individual users. Although this is true to a certain degree, the extent of information about personal choices and behavior only fuels the notion of technology translates to power not comfort. The idea of smart as it stands today may then only be a fallacy; just another rebranded version of technological determinism.

However, the tools at our disposal are more powerful than ever for data analysis and visualizations which Stanley (2008) refers to as “the golden age of statistical graphics” (Friendly M., 2008). We are able to understand shortcomings of policies to services better through information gathering and data analysis.

This has arguably contributed towards efficient delivery of services in many cities around the world.

Every day we are being equipped with new technologies in the field of sensing and data gathering. Very recent inventions of flying insect scale robots (Ma K. Y., et al, 2013) and visual sensors that closely resemble an insect’s eye (Borst A. and Plett J., 2013) further suggest the direction of miniaturization in devices in gathering data. The more we move towards augmented reality through inventions such as Google Glass, Microsoft Kinect and Nokias’ Mixed Reality, the more these devices are able to transmit data to enable ‘customized’ services to the users. This is, however, not a new phenomenon. The symbiotic relationship between map and data has been used for a long time. As early as late 1960’s, IBM has used location based information to address health care through correlating cancer data and locations of poverty in urban areas (Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., 2011). Nevertheless, major challenges remain. Often organizations use themes like is ‘connecting people to data’ and ‘make the world better’ (Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., 2011) for their smart services. However, as with every service, there are equity issues associated with this approach. There will always be questions of what data is being connected to which person, as well as the anonymity in personal data. This deterministic approach has only resulted in exacerbating the urban problems. For example Ceruzzi (2003) points out that Silicon Valley has some of the most real congested highways in the country, as people commute to work with a technology that Henry Ford invented to reduce urban congestion (Ceruzzi P. E., 2003).

Although data is contributing to enterprises that make livelihood and work efficient, the approach is notoriously top down as it is inequitable. Most urban issues pertain to neighborhoods that have deep rooted socio-economic challenges. Availability of solutions that particularly depend on high-tech gadgets and devices to a wider populace, albeit becoming cheaper, is still a question. The reach of e-governance programs is also constantly questioned because of their failure to address some of the most basic needs in urban slums areas where income is from informal sources. Rio de Janeiro, one of the first cities to be fully equipped with smart technologies and an IBM’s ‘customer’, still faces issues of urban divide and high percent of crime in its favelas.

In light of Big Data’s role in everyday operations and decision making, the need for understanding its implications are paramount. Although data analytics organizations are impacting many facets of life, especially making city governments their customers, there is still a lot to be desired in terms of how the data is creating better livelihoods for citizens. There is also a need for understanding and integrating biological systems information such as climatic, and biotic; sociological systems of basic human needs, into the Big Data revolution. Underneath the self-designation and investment in smart systems by cities, the primary motivation of urban regeneration and economic development is only analogous to previous programs of designated zones and infrastructure developments (Hollands R. G., 2011). Presence of smart systems is not a measure of city’s success in incorporating technology. Therefore, there is an obvious need for flexibility in adapting to the rapidly changing, sophisticated technological systems; and finding ways to understand and improve human capital, as well as environmental conditions. ‘Working’ definitions of smart should constitute human-centric and bio-centric approaches rather than techno-centric or capital-centric.

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Smart urbanization then becomes an evolutionary framework of cities being intelligent in decision making through advanced tools at their disposal, not at the mercy of large organizations but through a participatory process.

6. Conclusion The symbiotic relationship between technology and human condition has never been stronger and will continue to grow. Large corporations’ contribution to this is a testimony to the prominence of growing interdependence of man and the machine through the complex bridge of Data. As advancements in technology are likely to further the debate of what and how much techno-centric initiatives contribute and address the quintessential human conditions of poverty, social polarization and inequity (Hollands R. G., 2011); and an already tense relationship of modern society to the biological systems. The allowance provided by pervasiveness of powerful computing in everyday life will be able to serve certain political agendas if misused as is seen in the case of many smart city initiatives and the returns are not what they are expected to be in terms of urban regeneration. As modern society reconfigures itself around flows of information, there certainly is a need for better use of emerging tools at our disposal to address the aforemetioned challenges that continue to plague us today. Smart urbanization cannot be achieved only through application of so called smart technologies in managing urban systems, but rather being mindful of the complex condition that is ultimately shaping how we understand and manage urbanization. A good starting step would be through a process of supple democratization rather than driven by capital, where innovation serves some of the basic needs smartly far from becoming technologically deterministic and limited.

References Borst A. and Plett J., (2013), “Optical Devices: Seeing the world through an insect's eyes”, Nature 497, May 2013 pp. 47–48 Cambell-Kelly M., (2003), From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, MIT Press, Cambridge.

Campbell T., (2012), Beyond Smart Cities: How cities network, learn and innovate, Earthscan, New York.

Castells M., (1989), The informational city : Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process, Blackwell, Oxford.

Castells M., (1996), The Rise of Network Society: The Information Age. Blackwell, Cambridge.

Ceruzzi P. E., (2003), A History of Modern Computing Second Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge.

Cuff D., (2003), “Immanent Domain: Pervasive Computing and the Public Realm”, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 57, Issue 1, September 2003, pp. 43-49.

Dawes S. S., (2009), “Governance in the digital age: A research and action framework for an uncertain future”, Government Information Quarterly 2, Elsevier, 2008, pp. 257 – 264.

Deakin M., Waer H. A., (2012), From Intelligent to Smart Cities, Ch. II, pp. 8-20, Routledge, Oxon.

Dirks S., and Keeling M.. (2008), A Vision of Smart Cities: How cities can lead the way into a prosperous and sustainable future, IBM Institute for Business Value, IBM Global Business Services, IBM, Armonk Friendly M., (2008), “The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics”, Statistical Science, Vol. 23, No. 4, November 2008, pp. 502-535.

Glaeser E., (2011), Triumph of the City, Penguin Press, New York.

Graham S., (2002), “Bridging Urban Digital Divides: Urban Polarization and Information and Communication Technologies”, Urban Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, January 2002, pp. 33-56.

Hollands R. G., (2011), “Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?”, City, Vol. 12, No. 3, Routledge, New York, December 2008, pp. 10-19.

Hughes A. C., and Hughes T. P., (2000), Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, MIT Press, Cambridge.

IBM, (2012), Annual Report 2012, IBM, Armonk.

Komninos N., (2008), Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks, Routledge, New York.

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Laszlo, C., Zhexembayeva, N., (2011), Embedded sustainability: The next big competitive advantage, Stanford Business Books, Stanford.

Lee M., (2010), “A Political Economic Critique of Google Maps and Google Earth”, Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 13, No. 6, September 2010, pp. 909 – 928.

Ma K. Y., et al, (2013), “Controlled Flight of a Biologically Inspired, Insect-Scale Robot”; Science 340, May 2013 pp. 603-607.

Maney K., Hamm S., and O’Brien J. M., (2011), Making The World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped A Century And A Company, IBM Press, Upper Saddle River.

McFarlane C., (2011), Learning the city : Knowledge and translocal assemblage (1st ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, Malden.

MGI, (2011), Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, Mckinsey Global Institute.

Mitchell W. J., (1999), E-topia : "urban life, jim--but not as we know it", MIT Press, Cambridge.

Perlman J. E., (1987), “Megacities and Innovative Technologies”, Cities, Vol. 4, Issue 2, May 1987, pp.

128-136.

Pugh E. W., (1996), Building IBM, MIT Press, Cambridge.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Neil Brenner and Edward Eigen for their immense insights in the development of this research project; Christopher Alton, Danika Cooper, and Jamie Lemon for providing comments on the manuscript.

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Digital Mapping: the analysis of the social realm of Urbino Corinna Morandi

Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies E-mail: corinna.morandi@polimi.it

Riccardo Palmieri Politecnico di Milano Scuola di Architettura e SocietĂ E-mail: corinna.morandi@polimi.it

Bogdan Stojanovic

Politecnico di Milano Scuola di Architettura e SocietĂ E-mail: orange.bogdan@hotmail.com

Ludovica Tomarchio

Politecnico di Milano Scuola di Architettura e SocietĂ E-mail: ludovicatomarchio@gmail.com

The use and the spread of social media has created a vast amount of data that could be collected in real time maps and give new insights into the use of the city. Those data are automatically produced, free and continuously updated. Our analysis tries to understand the public realm of urbino, representing data coming from the most common social media, considering their own specificity. The outputs are some maps exploring different aspects, using data collected until 01-2013. Different social networks have been studied to catch significant results: Foursquare to individuate the social landmarks, as places people tend to recognize with, and the attendance ratio (check-ins/people), to understand which are the most attended public spaces; Instangram to profyle every registered person, as to define the city users of some public spaces; Flickr to identify the touristical hotspot of the city.

Keywords: public realm, social networks, digital analysis, historic centre

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1. Social Network Analysis Reading the dynamics of an urban settlement has traditionally been a challenging endeavour, often requiring long hours of observation and interviews. This process has been extremely simplified thanks to the raise of new methodologies of data recollection and representation, induced by the diffusion of digital technologies.

Particularly interesting is the chance offered by the collection, organization and interpretation of data coming from social networks, passively provided by users.

Therefore, a large number of individuals can be studied, without directly involving them in the research: whether the user expresses no restrictions in terms of privacy rights, this data can be easily obtained, gathered and visualized towards proper maps. There are clear advantages in the employ of so-obtained information, primarily because they are automatically produced, free and continuously updated.

Thus, the main issue concerns the selection and interpretation criteria these data are read through. At this purpose three main features must be kept in mind: • The Goal. It is necessary to clarify which is the purpose of the investigation. The research has to be finalized since the beginnings: data have to be considered as signifiers, the significance of which is attributed by the aim of the research at large. In general terms, social networks maps can help in comprehending two main factors: ! the use of the space in the city: whether social media active population is usually present in that place, if they tend to come back, what is the part of the day when they tend to use the place; ! discover new poles in the city: whether places are perceived as significant for a city, which are the places most talked about or that are most photographed.

• The Target. Geo-located data from social networks come from citizens equipped with a smartphone or another GPS device and, even if continuously growing, these people do not represent the most substantial portion of the population. This type of analysis, therefore, has to keep in account the number of subjects is able to observe. There are certain countries that record a higher number of smartphones-equipped citizens and among these it has to be considered the percentage that uses a smartphone to access to social networks sites. Nevertheless even in smartphone-intensive-use places, the incidence changes from area to area. For sure a research based on location services and applications will be more effective if applied on a metropolitan reality, where the quantity and use of smartphones and highly technological tools are pretty widespread. Finally, it has to be taken in account that young people are considerably more engaged with cell phones than their elders. In this sense a research founded on social networks traces can’t be considered as an exhaustive cross-section of the urban reality, since it will be related to a proportion of the population with less than thirty-five years.

• Distinctive Traits. What has been observed is that every social network brings with it peculiar features, connected to the nature of the platform itself, to the type of sharable contents, to the main kind of user.

The main difference occurs between location-sharing applications, allowing users to continuously collect and share their current location (such as Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla) and social media applications, whose aim is to let collect and share different kind of contents (pictures, video, comments) and eventually embed the current location of users (Facebook, Instagram).

These latters, indeed, present a more implicit will to communicate a massage about a place. Even if it’s the user that each time is able to choose whether including or not his geographical position in the content he means to share, his location is not the chief focus of his social interaction: it’s a sort of side effect. This circumstance is particularly meaningful, as this kind of digital footprints on the city can be considered as a more spontaneous pattern of the truly most attended places by smartphone-equipped dwellers: those are the real venues where people spend their urban lives and from which they socially interact.

A different speech regards the location-sharing applications (LSAs), such as Foursquare. These applications have to be seen as an apparatus aiming at creating social interactions among users, where

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the shared content is not a picture or a written message, it is the declaration of the current location.

Thus, information about venues becomes a tool to catch the attention in a one-to-many/one-to-all process and to boost self-representation. The places where people check-in using Foursquare, for instance, do not necessarily embody the places of the city where the users spend the most of their lives, but they represent instead the spots and nodes they consider as most representative and they mean to broadcast.

Briefly, it is enough fair to assert that the choice of the social networks to place under analysis is essential. Since it gives enough precise indications about the kind of response it is possible to obtain from each of them.

2. Social Network Analysis in Urbino Referred to the case of Urbino, a research based on social network traces results to be particularly significant.

Actually, Urbino is a small town in the central part of Italy characterized by a condition of spatial isolation, either due to the holography of the site and to the lack of heavy infrastructure of the area.

Moreover, Urbino houses an important university and the number of students its historic centre hosts, mainly as temporary inhabitants, is almost equal to that of native dwellers.

The digital mapping suits particularly well these conditions. Specifically the first feature, the geographical isolation in which the city lays since its foundation, makes Urbino ideal as an in vitro test to observe the social dynamics through social network traces.

Actually, the most important factor in an in vitro test is the possibility to isolate the object of analysis from any other source of contamination. Urbino is located on a selective culture medium, where no contaminations with exogenous factor are possible and the number of interaction of the inner members – even if conspicuous –is easily controllable and manageable. Furthermore, these contributions can be immediately addressed in the urban planning.

Finally, the high percentage of young population – especially in the historic centre – can offer a positive answer the main question: “Is the senseable portion of users significant to the terms of the research?”

3. Methodology The social networks observed in this analysis are mainly three.

• Foursquare. It is a mobile application, though which members could note their locations and find out where friends are.

• Instagram. It is a mobile application that enables online photo sharing. Users could take a picture, apply a digital filter to it, and share it, with its location.

• Flickr. It is a located pictures gallery edited on the web and at home.

The data we collected are all the contents produced by users until January 2013.

The data under observation refer to a range shifting from 1000 to 5000 contributions.

Considering then the students as the main profile using social media, that is a 20-30% of the whole section.

What is relevant to bring to the attention is how the here proposed interpretation of data revealed via social platforms is not intended as a reading of statistics. The one at issue is a qualitative, not quantitative, research, the purpose of which is to define a possible methodology for the use of data coming from digital devices within the urban planning operations.

Moreover, the proposed interpretation and graphic representation of the data on the maps was “analogically” made by the authors of the research. Interactions, in fact, have been sought directly from

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the chosen social networks, by geo-location (for example, “within four kilometers from Urbino”) or semantic (“Urbino public spaces”) querying.

The research carried out in these terms leads to a limitation that is related to the query settings imposed by the social networks. The returned information, actually, does not necessarily represent all the data that have been produced within a certain urban venue since the foundation of the social network, but there might be limitations both in time and in terms of the amount of available data.

The platform, in fact, can establish that the research is made exclusively on data produced within a certain period of time (for example, the last four weeks) or that to each search corresponds a maximum fixed number of spotted answers.

In the circumstances, the maximum number of search results is not a major problem, since generally the fixed limit is definitely higher than the amount of interactions produced in a really small reality like that of Urbino. Time limits, otherwise, could adversely affect the results of a survey conducted as a statistical analysis.

4. Proposed interpretation of data.

Popularity map (Figure 1) The relevance of the Foursquare for our analysis deals with the fact that the geo-localization made by the user is not one of the extra-information that goes together with the shared content, it constitutes the shared content itself.

Figure 1. Popularity Map

The here (Figure 1) reported analysis has been conducted until January 2013, considering the Foursquare interactions geo-localized within one kilometer from the center of Urbino In our research we decided to refer to an evaluation criterion we called popularity and identifiable as the sum of parameter that can be reported on Foursquare: check-ins, photos, people, comments. The higher the amount of these four, the most popular a place has to be considered on the social platform.

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It has to be noticed that the parameters identifying the evaluation criterion of popularity are not particularly relevant if considered separately, since it is not possible to frame a group of user or a defined attitude considering a single element per time. Pictures, for instance, are not necessarily connected to a touristic vocation of an area, since they could be – and actually are – both uploaded by tourists yearning to share their suggestive captures of the city, as well as by dwellers, sharing images from their daily lives.

A cross interpretation is instead extremely powerful and reveals hidden dynamics the interpretation of which is exceptionally significant for our research.

Attendence ratio map (Figure 2) The attendance ratio (Figure 2) represents the relation between check-ins and people, in Foursquare, that is the number of check-ins and the number of users that checked-in. For instance, whether a place records five-hundred check-ins from a hundred different people, it will mean that those people came back to that place – and they checked-in – five times. It is a relevant value for the analysis, since it gives an address to what kind of users and what kind of relationships they establish with spaces.

Figure 2. Attendence Ratio Map

In fact, an attendance ratio close to the unit value – which means with a number of check-in almost equal to the number of persons who checked-in, suggests a type of space visited once in a lifetime, to which is assigned such an importance that make the user want to witness and share the visit within his social sphere.

The first hypothesis is that this kind of attendance ratio is connected to the symbolic value of space. It generally regards extremely representative places, with a high incidence of tourists.

The second hypothesis, instead, generally related to the first one, concerns more the design of the space and relates more closely to native residents and long-term users. It regards those public spaces that have not been designed to meet long lengths of stay and are exempt from benches, trees, covering structures, ergonomic surfaces or materials. The user, even if living or spending a long time in that city, probably a few steps far from that place, doesn’t come back and, in case he does, he doesn’t stay there enough to check-in.

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The places which have an attendance ratio between two and five are commonly frequented places, presumably by the inhabitants of the city. Those generally are meeting places, squares, gardens, small parks, which are often facing entertainment and retail activities, including bars and cafes.

Public spaces that present an attendance ratio greater than five are identified as habitual places. The number of check-in is significantly higher than that of the people who have carried out, this means that a given number of users continue to return to that place with a given frequency and check-in.

An attendance ratio of this kind is chiefly caused by two coexisting reasons.

The first implies that at issue is a place that involves a regular attendance: such as universities, libraries and offices. These are places where people return frequently, mainly due to the nature of the activity that took place there.

A high attendance ratio can be considered as a form of common practice on a space and this is fueled by the operating mechanism of Foursquare itself. Since the platform makes the user gradually conquer higher virtual badge the more he checks-in in a place, until arriving to the status of mayor. This system allows the user to identify in one place and get aware of the presence of other people which are doing the same and collaborate – or virtual challenge – with them in the creation of a site-specific community.

Profiled use of space map (Figure 3) Instagram enables us to reconstruct a sufficiently detailed profile of its users, which is tremendously relevant to outline more precisely the urban phenomena we mean to observe.

The profiling process starts from the description the user embed to his Instagram ID, reporting data about his age, the city where he lives, his job.

Whether the information provided directly by the user are not available or are considered not sufficient for the purposes of the research, it is interesting to observe where the pictures were taken. This reveals information about the movements within the city and out of it; for instance, if a user has taken most of his picture in Rome and just few in Paris – furthermore in a limited time frame – it is quite fair to affirm that he lives in Rome and has visited Paris for a few days as a tourist.

Clearly it is not always so easy to identify the dynamics that govern the life of a user based on his movements. In case the number of pictures and their location are not per se significant, the observation must move toward the evaluation of the content of the picture itself. Suppose a member of the social network would display a pretty similar number of photos taken in separate locations at the maximum distance of a couple of hours from each other, the image content may be extremely important to understand the type of user.

Therefore to the first place may be associated photos of interiors – a home cooking, a couch – still in the picture may appear elements of a exclusively homemade clothing or even be associated with tautological descriptions – "home sweet home". The second of the two locations listed may be reserved for photos in which appear classrooms, the interior of an office or simply outside pictures. In this case it will be suitably safe to assume the user is a commuter, who lives in the first place and goes to the second location – and the frequency can eventually be established on the uploading dates of the pictures – for work or study.

Applying this methodology of observation to the case of Urbino, by February 2013 we identified one hundred sixty Instagram users, which were using the geo-location option in sharing their contents. These profiles have been studied to identify which were the most attended places in the urban centre and who the users actually were. This latter observation is really powerful to the terms of our research, since it permits to identify which are the most attractive spots of the city for students, tourist, commuters and inhabitants and how their dynamics influence each other. It also reveals the places that do not appear in this mapping, probably because they are felt like less representative, unappreciated or simply unknown.

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Figure 3. Profiled Use of Space Map

Figure 4. Touristic Representative Poles Map

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Touristic representative poles map (Figure 4) Flickr is a virtual gallery that let users share pictures.

The pictures are usually taken with a camera, and the uploading moment to the virtual gallery is different from the moment the picture is taken.

Users come back home, select the pictures they find more significant and upload them, geo-referenced.

It is a more reflexive moment compared to Instangram. The former, in fact requires the camera and the selection. Instangram on the contrary let users crystalize a moment they were living in urban life: it is a more compulsive action.

This type of features of Flickr frames the analysis of data considering them referred to particular users and leading to a particular interpretation of the results.

The users having camera are usually tourists and visitors. The moment of selection induce to understand the results in order of representative poles, the places that are considered as the hotspots to see when visiting Urbino, or beautiful places scattered in the main touristic paths.

Figure 5. Screen Shot of the web-based instant map

5. Conclusion It has been shown how social networks analysis could help in the understanding of the public realm, in particular in small historic centres. It has been studied what kind of information is extracted from each social network. It is important now to focus the attention on what to do with the results.

The aim of this social media-based researches could be the recollection of data to be visualized in a map, the finality of which is to make evident invisible social dynamics or poorly perceived information at a traditional analysis. In this sense, the invasion of privacy may make sense, as the goal lies in providing an open-data tool, therefore accessible to all citizens, which raises awareness towards the issue of citizenship and that makes the inhabitant closer to the spaces of the city, enhancing the liveability of these latters.

Moreover the displaying of the results of the individual action activates in the dweller a raising mindfulness towards the common destiny of the city. Maps thus created have the capability to influence the behaviour of users once they are published and as a consequence the work, travel and social patterns of the urban people could gradually change. This process is called feedback loop, according to what has been studied by many urban sociologists and already experienced in similar projects of instant mapping.

Thus the maps here explained have been programmed in a real time web-based application (Figure 5) in order to provide free to access spatial information within the historic centre of Urbino.

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References Aguitton C., Cardon D., Smoreda Z., (2009), Living Maps: New data, new uses, new problems, Orange Lab, Paris.

De Waal M., (2008), From BLVD Urbanism towards MSN Urbanism. Locative media and urban culture, via http://www.martijndewaal.nl/?p=116 Pew Research Centre, (2012), Social Networking Popular Across Globe, Global Attitude Project, via http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/12/12/social-networking-popular-across-globe/ Shirvanee L., (2006), “Locative Viscosity: Traces of Social Histories in Public Space”, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 14, No. 3.

Tuters M., Varnelis K., (2006), “Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things”, Leonardo, August, Vol. 39, No. 4, Pages 357-363, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Acknowledgments This research was made possible by the help of Paolo Ceccarelli who is right now in charge to develop the Piano Strategico and the Piano di Gestione dell’Unesco for the city of Urbino. A special thank goes to Riccardo Feligiotti who gave us a lot of information about Urbino. Simone Manneschi was in charge to program the web-based application.

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The urban and the self across three utopias Mediated representations in urban Vietnam Paolo Patelli Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies E-mail: paolo.patelli@polimi.it

The city is a site where we make our lives public, through brief but accumulated interactions (Jacobs).

Accordingly, the notion of Öffentlichkeit – public sphere – implied, in the bourgeois Western world, a spatial concept, as well as the collective body constituted in this process - "the public" (Habermas). The geography of the public sphere has often been considered equivalent to that of the urban public spaces (Arendt, among others). In other contexts, though, the meaning of our contingent definitions of “public”, “the public”, and “public sphere” are increasingly unclear. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are taken as example, as Vietnam moved from being a Socialist country, embraced first free market and then what was left of cyberspace. If everyday performances have created firstly a bustling street life in urban Vietnam, now novel techno-social practices afforded by Web 2.0 services are providing both a new vitality and spectacle, destabilizing state control in a struggle for meanings in physical spaces.

Keywords: public sphere, digital commons, web 2.0, Vietnam

1. Introduction “Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his environment.”

Kevin Lynch (Lynch, K., 1960) The radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers.

Bertold Brecht (Brecht, B., 1964) "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"

"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."

Richard P. Feynman (Feynman, R. P., 1985) Gianni Vattimo argues that the post-modern condition is linked to the development of the mass media and the diffusion of systems of communication. He disputes the belief that this development will produce a more enlightened, self-conscious and 'transparent' society, maintaining, nevertheless, that it leads to a

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diversity of viewpoints, which render societies more complex, even chaotic. The multiplication of perspectives on the world disorientates us and removes the certainties we gain from our local culture (Vattimo, G., 1989).

This paper presents a somehow optimistic approach and tries to hint at what can we learn – from the perspective of urban studies and design - from the art of living in a world characterized by the widespread accessibility and reproducibility of information and communication, from ambiguity and flux, in particular, looking at a preliminary study on the two major Vietnamese cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The presented thesis is that the opportunities posed by new media are not so much about the actual products themselves as objects or commodities, but about the results produced from their behavior. New media afford new behaviors, new interactions, ways to negotiate meanings and identities, to build and share imageries.

2. Urban experience and mediated publics It is true that the city, like a piece of architecture, is a construction in space, but one of a more complex and multifaceted nature: a city “can only be experienced in the course of a long spans of time” and through the interaction of citizens in its spaces, places or stages. The city has temporal dimensions, which exceed the controlled and limited sequences of other temporal arts and media: “on different occasions and for different people, the sequences are reversed, interrupted, abandoned, cut across.” (Lynch, K., 1960).

Nothing is experienced by itself; everything is in a dynamic relation with its surroundings as well as with the events leading to it, with past experiences and memories. “Every citizen has had long associations with some part of its city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings”(Lynch, K., 1960).

Our knowledge and our experience of the urban environment are influenced by attention, perception and memory. How do the diffusion of new media and the increasingly mediated nature of our spatial transform the urban imagery?

Inside most definitions of “place” - certainly an elusive concept – one can often find the ideas of geological strata and that of palimpsest: when relations become operational, a place can then be understood as a hypertext - material and abstract at the same time - to be unfolded: a site where things are layered and many have written (Corbox A., 2001 ; Marot, S., 2003), where connections can be drawn.

Places have been palimpsests ever since their beginning: the contemporary is constantly being constructed upon the foundations of the old. Yet, recently, the concept of “place” has begun to take on an entirely new dimension, as millions of places are being represented and augmented in cyberspace by a labor force of hundreds of thousands of individual writers, cartographers and artists. The virtual Earth is not a simple mirror of its physical counterpart, but is instead characterized by both black holes of information and hubs of rich description and detail. The tens of millions of places represented virtually are part of a worldwide engineering practice that is unprecedented in scale or scope and made possible by contemporary Web 2.0 technologies. What Mark Graham defined the “virtual Earth” is more than just a collection of digital maps, images and articles that have been uploaded into Web 2.0 cyberspaces; it is instead a fluid and malleable alternate dimension that both influences and is influenced by the physical world (Graham M., 2010).

In the bourgeois Western world, the notion of Öffentlichkeit – public sphere – implies a spatial concept, the social sites where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated, as well as the collective body constituted in this process, "the public" (Habermas, J., 1989). The geography of the public sphere, though, has been considered equivalent to that of the urban public spaces, not only in the case of the Parisian boulevards (Habermas, J., 1989), but ever since the Greek polis, and its agora were established (Arendt H., 1958). Access to information, communication, the construction of identities through confrontation and debate are urban activities, and they have always involved media, even when they were “old”.

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3. Vietnam through Socialism, Free Market and Cyberspace The concept of “public sphere” is peculiar of the Western world, and it may be difficult to apply in nonWestern societies. Nevertheless, as in developing countries of the former socialist world the processes of urbanization - and urban life itself – still seem to be poorly understood, such terms may yet retain substantial descriptive power, at least at an everyday level.

Vietnam, after the expulsion of the French in 1954, was left divided politically into two states, and only reunificated under a communist regime after a long war in 1975. Since then, the country has long been stuck in ideology and permanent economic shock, until in 1986 a new set of leaders, following China's example, embraced the free market, under a new policy called “doi moi”, meaning “renovation”. Since 2000, its economic growth has been among the highest in the world and such high growth is set to continue (O’Neill J., et al., 2012).

Contemporary Vietnam has currently 30% of total population living in cities, with a 3% annual rate of change (2010-15 est.) pointing the country towards an urban future1. At the same time, lifestyles are becoming “urban”: since the early 2000s, economic and social changes, especially in the biggest cities Hanoi (2.668 million inhabitants) and Ho Chi Minh City (5.976 million inhabitants) - have paved the way for a dramatic transformation in the ways in which city spaces - streets, pavements and markets - are experienced and imagined by the population (Mandy T., 2002). Where there were wide open spaces, big city-center squares, with huge buildings and rhetoric monuments on strict axial plans, individual mobility, street-trading and public crowding around popular events has led to the emergence of a distinct public sphere (Mandy T., 2002). Public spaces in Vietnam’s major cities are still the product of extreme centralization, urban and architectural ensembles explicitly designed to instill respect for power, expressly conceived for the mass spectacles of dictatorship, for the synchronized movements of crowds.

Nonetheless, while during the Nineties squares were three-dimensional survivors from a dead age, with almost nothing left to celebrate apart from the funerals of party hierarchs (Harms E., 2011), and little to make the area feel like a social space, in the 2000s instant architectures started to appear and vanish, along with events and public manifestations.

Vietnam, a country where the government controls all broadcast media exercising oversight through the Ministry of Information and Communication, witnesses the emergence of practices of appropriation and confrontation, displaced to the immaterial nodes and networks of electronic media and information systems, following to the affordances of media spaces and Web 2.0 for collaboration and augmentation.

The impressing proliferation of digital media in Vietnam is a function of Internet use: only 34% of the population in 2010 had access to the Internet, but mobile penetration was higher than 100% and 97% of Vietnam Internet users aged 15-24 in 2011 were using social media, and mobile 3G subscribers were growing by 358% per year. Unlike in developed markets, where growth in social network usage has plateaued, Vietnam and other emerging markets are experiencing rapid increase (Evens P., 2012). As in many other authoritarian countries, the Internet has opened up doors for dissent and social criticism.

Of course, this is also an effect of the decentralization and withdrawal of power from the urban space, now residing elsewhere, as in exurban business parks, but that is not to say that the square has no political power left in it. Quite the contrary, as it was for Jane Jacobs, it can still be said that the city is a site where we make our lives public, through even brief but accumulated interactions (Jacobs J., 1993) and the phantom public that the mass spectacles simulated had suddenly been brought to life (Hatherley O., 2012). Despite the fact that the new generation within the ruling class might be “interested in doing business, not politics”2, at least the fact that they do not have much respect for those in power, has led in

1 2

CIA The World Facts Book: Vietnam. Retrieved 2012-09-15.

“Half-way from Rags to Riches.” The Economist, April 24, 2008. http://www.economist.com/node/11041638.

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the past two years to flickers of a pro-democracy movement, asking the Vietnamese leadership to accept that a market economy works best when there is a free market in politics too.

In such context, the meaning of “publics”, “the public”, and “public sphere” are increasingly unclear. Is the public an anonymous mass, which includes consumers and tourists, or a form of resistance to the privatization or social spaces?

In place of (and opposed to) the cohesive unity of the people, the public is affirming itself within the category of the “multitude”, which signifies “plurality” - literally: being many – as a form of social and political existence, consisting of a network of individuals. The metropolis is the space where the multitude deploys itself (Virno P., 2003), producing a plurality of performances and urban imaginaries.

If everyday performances have created firstly a bustling streetlife in urban Vietnam, now novel technosocial practices afforded by Web 2.0 services are destabilizing state control in a struggle for meanings in physical spaces and digital publics. The uses and struggles over such spaces announce a new discursive platform over Vietnamese cultural imagery, as state-controlled events are being deserted and novel, contentious social manifestations are moving to the foreground.

Boundaries between public and private arenas are becoming more fluid and routinely transgressed, as in Western societies, but in ways that are distinctive to the Vietnamese situation. Vietnam displays resurgence rather than a death of streetlife, but also a convergence in the construction of ‘pseudo-public’ leisure spaces (Mandy T., 2002). These spaces – increasingly often malls, multiplex, airports and cafes – are crucial in the construction of a new representation of the self for the Vietnamese citizens, who are now, after socialism, free market and cyberspace, building their new public image, through the places they choose to inhabit and how: from being and having to being and dwelling. Due to urbanization processes and to novel techno-social practices, not only the urban population is increasing, but lifestyles, mindsets and imaginaries are changing: urban space is not just where buildings are dense, but where a public image is built. The urbanist André Corboz used to quote the roman poet Rutilius Romatianus, who in the V century BC wrote about Rome: “Urbem fecisti quod prius orbit erat”: the image of the self is strictly linked to an urban imaginary, which is increasingly global.

This new imaginary is largely built through the performativity of everyday mobilities: interdependent movements of people, objects, information and ideas. Mobilities produce social life organized across distance and form (and re-form) its contours through the (re-)configuration of people, objects, and spaces as part of dwelling and place-making. The urban imaginary and the urbanite’s self representation within it, are affected by the corporeal travel of people for work, leisure, family life, pleasure, migration and escape; but also by imaginative travel, through talk and images of places and peoples appearing on and moving across multiple media, and by communicative travel through person-to-network contact, which can be either direct or mediated (Büscher M., John Urry, 2009). Fluxes and flows, passivity, dwelling, placemaking, the effervescence of co-presence, the relation of represented or imagined presences, absences, deferrals are increasingly traceable and easy to share. In contrast with the – now passé and archaic – idea of Cyberspace, which possibly became the last utopia of the 20th century and gave way to the imagination of a global mind, hyperconnected and infinitely powerful, digital media and network technologies are now part of the performativity of everyday life; the Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media. Along with this, the public transformed, now inhabiting multiple, overlapping and global networks such as user forums, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, blogs, and wikis. These developments offer new platforms for social engagement and political action whose spatial and architectural implications are still matters of speculation. Experience of material public space has been radically transformed with the proliferation of mobile and pervasive media technologies throughout the physical space of the city. The explosion of social media tools posed new challenges to the Party-state’s capacity to control public opinion. They provide alternative sources of information, the Internet has facilitated self-organization among social activists, and its many communication tools allow them to assemble virtually, strengthen friendships and become empowered as a community. At the same time, shared and diffused ICT infrastructures are introducing novel ways by which immaterial bits of media and

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information are tied to physical locations in urban public space and to polyrhythmic social practices within the metropolis.

New techno-social practices allow augmentation and appropriation, a “territorialization” of the social and political multitudes inhabiting the metropolis; they show the potential to generate new hybrid spaces and forms of public participation that reconnect the material dimensions of urban public space with the affordances of the networked public sphere.

How are the old concepts of identity, property, expression and participation, based as they were on physical and cohesive manifestations, do apply in a post-digital regime? How are attention, perception and memory influenced by mediated interactions with the urban body?

Getting to an understanding of the profound intertwining of urban processes with political and social change in a transitional society requires investigating mutual interactions.

4. An image of the city through its “tweets” Twitter is an online social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters - "tweets". Despite the fact that content shared over such medium is often and overtly considered nothing more than ephemeral chronicle, common language can be a precious source for understanding broad spatial, social and political transformations.

To say something is to do something; discourse is a situated action 0. As in Aristotle, Rhetoric espouses particular views of the world and aims to explore the dynamic interaction of a rhetorical text with its context. Discourse is symbolic action: reality is a social construction and individuals are symbol creators and consumers. Language makes subjective meanings ‘real’, and at the same time typifies these meanings through creating ‘semantic fields or zones of meaning within which daily routines proceed. Discourse creates mental frames that are ‘meta-communicative’ (Bateson G., 1999), simultaneously highlighting certain meanings and excluding others. Discursive construction takes place through social interaction.

Tweets shared in Hanoi during the month of August 2012 show a spike on the 5th: the day 200 participants followed a leader bearing a rainbow flag through the city, in a bid to improve both their own self-confidence and society's acceptance of the LGBT community: the country's first-ever gay pride parade, spurred by an unexpected government proposal to recognize same-sex couples in law [see Fig. 2].

Looking at Ho Chi Minh City, we notice that 90% of the geolocalized tweets still reference the city by its pre-liberation name of Saigon. This choice reveals the conflicted nature of contemporary urbanization in Vietnam, and perhaps throughout the global South, where agrarian societies are attempting rapidly to transform themselves into cosmopolitan urban ones [see Fig. 4].

In both cities the term “Am”, associated symbolically with the moon, the female, the outside, rurality, is used three times more often than “Duong”, the sun, the male, the inside, urbanity. Outer city districts, “huyen”, are referenced much less than the inner city areas.

5. An image of the city through its “checkins” Foursquare, is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, whose users "check in" at venues, and each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges". Location is based on GPS hardware or network location.

The service redefines the environments as not the same as the physical world as it exists, taking on meaning in relation to the agents that inhabit it. Such spaces depend upon the gradual construction of complex ethologies of bodies and objects; repositories of proximities, positionings and juxtapositions

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allow things to become known. Sendings and receivings of tokens of techno-social lives, the constant hum of connection and interconnection, afford new performances, where there is more attention paid to verbs like intersect, connect, assemble rather than adjectives like rooted, individual, organic (Thrift N., and J.-D. Dewsbury, 2000). Communication within the city is not left anymore to signs and screens, but it extends to novel geographies of people, hands and keyboards. The cityscape, the boulevards, the market place, the park, the main square, pull audiences together and produce performers. The vortex of behaviors is a center of cultural self-invention. There is considerable room for the exploration of unintended meanings of all forms of space and space use.

Looking at the maps depicting the spatial distribution of checkins in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City [see Fig.1] [see Fig.3], we notice that the places where people build and share their public image are mainly private, commercial spaces, not related to the flow of subjective lives as they are linked to the spectacle and consumption of a westernized lifestyle: people construct their digital self through malls, multiplex, cafĂŠ and airports.

6. Conclusions Web 2.0, marked by the rapidly evolving domains of social media, and social networking, has affected all aspects of our daily life, reshaping how citizens form communities and cultures, forge social structures, utilize resources, and engage in politics. The metropolis welcomes the fragment, the invisible, the minute and it binds and connects them to build pluralities of meanings. Communication reshapes relationships of power, inserts itself into the real and into the urban stratification, rendering it more complex. This affects the mutually dependent image - the mental representation that each and every citizen builds of its environment - and the performances taking place within the geography of the urban publics, again through accumulations of “brief but accumulated interactions� (Jacobs J., 1993).

Figure 1. Hanoi. Venues listed in Foursquare. Circle radius visualizes the relative popularity among users.

Figure 2. Hanoi. Geo-localized content shared on Twitter during the month of August 2012. In red are tweets written in Vietnamese.

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Figure 3. Ho Chi Minh City. Venues listed in Foursquare. Circle radius visualizes the relative popularity among users.

Figure 2. Ho Chi Minh City. Geo-localized content shared on Twitter during the month of August 2012. In red are tweets written in Vietnamese.

References Arendt H., (1958), The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Austin, J. L. (1961) "Performative Utterances". In, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock.

Oxford University Press, Oxford Bateson G., (1999), [1972] Steps to an ecology of mind!: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Brecht B., (1964), “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication” in Brecht on Theatre, Hill and Wang, New York [«Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat» in Blätter des Hessischen Landestheaters, Darmstadt, No. 16, July 1932].

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Evens P., (2012), Vietnam - Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Forecasts. March 2012 (17th Edition).

Feynman R. P., (1985), “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!”!: adventures of a curious character, W.W. Norton, New York.

Graham M., (2010), “Neogeography and the palimpsests of place: Web 2.0 and the construction of a virtual earth”, Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 101(4), 422–436.

Habermas J., (1989), [1962] The structural transformation of the public sphere!: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Harms E., (2011), Saigon’s edge. On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Hatherley O., (2012), Across the Plaza: The Public Voids of the Post-Soviet City, Kindle Edition. Strelka Press.

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Mandy T., (2002), “Out of Control: Emergent Cultural Landscapes and Political Change in Urban Vietnam.” Urban Studies 39, no. 9 (August 1, 2002): 1611–1624.

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Acknowledgments This article is the first result of a personal research developed within the frame of the PhD course in Urban and Architectural Design at the Politecnico di Milano. This particular study started after a conversation with Bernd Upmeyer, who I thank for inviting me to publish it first on MONU #17 - Next Urbanism, a thematic issue about what comes after the BRICs, with regard to urbanization and urban culture.

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Mapping the changing city trough mobile phone data Paola Pucci Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani E-mail: paola.pucci@polimi.it

Fabio Manfredini Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani E-mail: fabio.manfredini@polimi.it

Paolo Tagliolato Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Dipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani E-mail: paolo.tagliolato@polimi.it

Moving from recent research on the analysis of mobile phone network data for urban studies in the Milan urban region, the paper will focus on how it is possible to map and visualize the changing city by means of this new source of information, characterized by a high temporal and spatial resolution.

The paper will compare several representations of urban dynamics in Milan Urban Region, obtained through both conventional data sources and mobile phone data, for discussing about the potential of this approach in providing a new insight on spatial and temporal patterns of the city. These spatial-temporal patterns are difficult to intercept through traditional data, used in urban studies. In particular, the scale of the observed phenomena, the time-dependent variation in urban spaces usages, the capability of describing and mapping recent changes, the need of new form of representations of the city are some of the topics that will be addressed in the discussion.

Keywords: mobile phone data, representation of the city, spatial patterns

Introduction In recent years, several research projects are focused on the potentiality of mobile phone traffic data as promising sources for the analysis, visualization and interpretation of people's presence

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and movements in urban spaces, by a high temporal and spatial resolution.

Interdisciplinary studies in the fields of urban geography, social studies, computing and interaction design, recognize anonymous and passive monitoring telephone traffic as a valuable alternative to traditional methods, because it can simultaneously overcome the limitations of the detection latency time typical of traditional data sources and take advantage of the pervasiveness of the detection area due to the ubiquity of mobile phones networks. The technology for determining the geographic location of cell phones and other hand-held devices, becoming increasingly available, has opened the way to a wide range of applications, collectively referred to as Location Based Services (LBS), that are primarily aimed at individual users. Among the three main types1 of survey methodologies, the researches focused on the analysis of aggregated mobile phone data are characterized by two different profiles and purposes: mapping mobile phone activity in urban contexts (Ratti, C., Pulselli, R. M., Williams, S. and Frenchman, D., 2006; Sevtsuk, A. and Ratti, C., 2010), and visualizing urban metabolism (Wolman, A., 1965; Acebillo, J., Martinelli A., 2012; Brunner, P. H., 2007).

The first approach, named Mobile landscape approach, focuses on the relationships between mobile phone measures and people's daily activities in cities (Ratti, C., Pulselli, R. M., Williams, S. and Frenchman, D., 2006; Sevtsuk, A. and Ratti, C., 2010). The aim is to understand patterns of daily life in the city, using a variety of sensing systems (mobile phone traffic intensity, location-based data as GPS devices, wireless sensor network) and to illustrate and to confirm the significant differences in the distribution of urban activities at different hours, days and weeks. Graphic representations of the intensity of urban activities and their evolution through space and time, based on the geographical mapping of mobile phone usage at different times of the day (Ratti, C., Pulselli, R. M., Williams, S. and Frenchman, D., 2006) are the main output of the Mobile Landscape approach.

The approach based on handsets’ movements studies the relationships between location coordinates of mobile phones and the social identification of the people carrying them (as Social Positioning Method and its possible applications in the organization and planning of public life proposed by Rein Ahas and Ülar Mark) (Ahas, R., Mark, Ü., 2005). In this direction an interesting issue regards the classification of urban spaces according to their users’ practices and behaviors in the use of cell phones (Soto and Frias-Martinez, 2011). In Robust land use characterization of urban landscapes using cell data (Soto and Frias-Martinez, 2011b), the authors outline the fact that city areas are generally not characterized by just one specific use, and for this reason they introduce the use of c-means, a fuzzy unsupervised clustering technique for land use classification, which returns for each area a certain grade of membership to each class.

Even if, from a technical point of view2, both the aforementioned approaches are based on the analysis of aggregated data and traffic volume detected on towers network, the loss of the traces of the origins and destinations of individual movements does not appear relevant for estimate the distribution patterns of the population in different time slots considered for the survey.

Using mobile phones for monitoring urban practices, both approaches show that phone calls are closely related to population density in urban areas (Ratti, C., Pulselli, R. M., Williams, S. and 1 The three main types of survey methodology are: • Individual traces detected with tracking technologies (such as GPS); • Anonymized Individual trajectories collected by mobile phone carriers; • Georeferenced and aggregated cell phone activity data.

2 Among the methods proposed in literature, we mention the social positioning method (SPM) of Positium LBS (Ahas and Mark, 2005; Ahas et al., 2010) based on active and passive positioning systems, and mobile census (MIT Senseable City Lab) which is instead a totally passive tracking system.

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Frenchman, D., 2006; Sevtsuk, A. and Ratti, C., 2010; Ahas, R., Mark, Ăœ., 2005; Reades, J., Calabrese, F., Sevtsuk, A. and Ratti, C., 2007), even if additional evidence is needed to show how mobile network

signals can be used to characterize and map different urban domains and their occupants and how this tool could support urban planning and urban policies.

In this general framework, our research is focused on how it is possible to map and visualize the changing city by means of this new source of information, characterized by a high temporal and spatial resolution. Our aim is to compare several representations of urban dynamics in Milan Urban Region, obtained through conventional data sources and mobile phone data, in order to discuss the potential of this approach in providing a new insight on spatial and temporal patterns of the city.

The aim is to question the heuristic potential of the maps arising from mobile phone data to represent spatial-temporal patterns of contemporary cities, that are difficult to intercept through traditional data.

An example of a representation of urban dynamics in the Milan Urban Region obtained through conventional data source3 is presented in figure 1. updateable to the present days nor extendable to other areas, because it is based on the 2002 survey data, available only for Lombardy and which have never been updated. Other sources, eventually available, are characterized by coarser spatial and temporal granularity and, above all, they are inadequate to describe new forms of mobility.

The map represents the density of all unsystematic movements, other than study and work, which occur in the Milan urban region on a typical 2002 working day. These unsystematic flows are related to individual habits and are the effects of diversified and complex uses of the Milan urban region.

Despite the fact that information on density of movements has been derived from data at the municipality scale, its representation varies in a continuous way across the urbanized territory.

This representation is typically used for visualizing environmental and meteorological phenomena.

The result is a new representation of the Milan urban region, a fluid image where the administrative boundaries disappear but where the territorial structure is clearly visible. In the map the high density of unsystematic movements is visible, along the Milan ring roads and in the Central Brianza (Northern Milan urban region), which is an area where many shopping centers are located; the same process can be observed along the Sempione Road and in commercial and business polarities in the South. The map highlights the mobility for personal reasons, for shopping and leisure, that is more and more relevant in daily mobility practices. Unfortunately it is not updateable to the present days nor extendable to other areas, because it is based on the 2002 survey data, available only for Lombardy and which have never been updated. Other sources, eventually available, are characterized by coarser spatial and temporal granularity and, above all, they are inadequate to describe new forms of mobility.

Table 1 compares the available sources on mobility in Lombardy. We can briefly outline some elements explaining their principal pros and cons: mobile phone data have, at least in urban areas, superior spatial resolution than conventional surveys, permitting to obtain finer visualization of mobility practices and to generate customized regions of analysis;

3

In 2002, the Lombardy Region realized a survey (Indagine OD Regione Lombardia) on mobility based on more than 750.000 interviews. This survey provides data on all mobility flows for the whole Lombardy region during 24 h of a typical working day.

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• The temporal resolution of mobile phone data is very high; it allows to monitor in time different practices at an hourly, daily or seasonal basis; • Mobile phone data lack of information regarding the means of transport used. It is therefore possible to derive only indirect indications about the traffic on main roads, by means of interpretation of derived maps; • Conventional surveys are expensive and it is possible to guess that, when informations derived by mobile phone data will be available on the market, their cost will be relatively low, being them already collected by providers both for accounting and for network monitoring.

Figure 1: Density of unsystematic mobility: number of trips per square km in 2002. Source: DiAP elaboration on the OD Regione Lombardia 2002 data.

Other informations regarding mobility in the region are available (see e.g. fig. 2) but they regard more specifically vehicular traffic along main roads. These data have fine grained temporal resolution but they are not able to represent individual mobility. Moreover they pertain only to main roads. The opacity of traditional data sources (available in aggregated form and not inscribed in a topological space) for reading the transformations of users’ practices and mobility patterns is a problem if we have to know the practical use of the city and the different forms of mobility (in terms of quantity and quality) in their articulation in time and in space. This information represents a necessary condition to manage and govern urban transformations, and transport supply too.

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Table 1: Comparing available sources on mobility in Lombardy

Figure 2: Real time traffic map on Italian highways (www.autostrade.it) (left) and real time traffic map on major roads in Milan (maps.google.it) (right).

New maps for the Milan Urban Region through mobile phone data In this framework, an interesting contribution aimed at describing the different densities and times of use of the city that traditional sources of analysis are unable to return with continuity, may come from mobile phone network data. Starting from the results of a research carried out in Lombardy Region, using mobile phone data provided by Telecom Italia [10], we intend to explore how new maps, based on unconventional data sources and better tailored to the dynamic

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processes in place, can represent spatialized urban practices and can give new insights for improving the effectiveness of urban policies.

In order to analyze the complex temporal and spatial patterns emerging from mobile phone data we used two different types of data. The first data type concerns the mobile phone traffic registered by the network over the whole Milan urban region (Northern Italy).

Data are expressed in Erlang, namely the average number of concurrent contacts in a time unit, and they are spatially distributed over a grid with squared cells of 250 meters for every 15-minute time interval. We performed time series analysis on this data along a period of 14 days in September 2009, in order to evaluate specific characteristics of population behaviors at an hourly and daily base. We then applied a novel geo-statistical unsupervised learning technique aimed at identifying useful information on hidden patterns of mobile phone use. We will show that these hidden patterns regard different usages of the city in time and in space and that they are related to the mobility of individuals. The results return new maps of the region, each describing the intensity of one of the identified mobility pattern on the territory. This highlights, in our opinion, the potentials of this data for urban planning and transport research studies.

The second typology of data consists in localized and aggregated tracks of anonymized mobile phone users. The data set was collected in different working days (five Wednesday in July, August, September, October and November 2012). In this case the available information was based on the geolocation of users’ mobile phone activity in time and in space. With mobile phone activity we intend each interaction of the device with the mobile phone network (i.e. calls received or made, SMSs sent or received, internet connections, etc..). This information was available at the level of the antenna which handled the activity. The distribution of antennas in the space depends on the amounts of mobile phone traffic that needs to be managed. In dense urban areas we therefore observe a high density of antennas while in the suburbs the density of antenna may be very low. From this capillar information (which is not directly accessible for privacy policy constraints) the extracted data, available to us, consisted in hourly time series of Origin Destination matrices returning the number of users flowed at each hour of a day from an origin to a destination zone. The zones of origin destination were determined as tiles of different tessellations. We defined and considered for this study a tessellation related to the density of antennas, consisting of 526 zones.

With localized and aggregated tracks of anonymized mobile phone users we put in evidence the main hourly distribution of origin – destination movements of a huge sample of people (more than one million per day). Our goal was to display prevalent fluxes of mobility at different hour of a typical working day through a visualization of the sum vector moving from each zone. The sum vector is the single vector resulting from the sum of all the single connections between each zone and the others and is characterized by two dimensions: the magnitude, which is function of the magnitudes of the original vectors and the angle which expresses the direction of the flux.

The sum vectors have been finally applied to each zone of the fine-grained tessellation.

A set of maps of the sum vector moving from each zone at different hours has been produced in order to highlight the main patterns of mobility during a typical working day (interactive map available at www.ladec.polimi.it/maps/od/fluxes.html).

The morning map (9pm; fig 3) confirm a polarization of movements towards the main centers offering job opportunities and highlights also the most commonly used infrastructures. On the other hand, the aggregated flows of mobile phone users in the afternoon allow to recognize significant places for shopping and leisure, that are attended after work.

Cell phone data have potential to produce maps, with temporal continuity throughout the day, describing the movements carried out for both work and personal reasons. Informations derived

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from the continuous mapping of flows represent an important basis to build policies for the provisioning of more effective public transport services. In this sense we can consider the map in fig. 4 (left): it represents the areas for which the flows towards Milan are more regular, varying the days. This provides considerable indications with respect to the effective catchment area of Milan, to which regulation measures and appropriate rates of the public transport service should correspond. If we compare the left and right maps in fig. 4, we can easily notice the disconnection between fixed jurisdictions and mobile factors (Estebe, P., 2008).

The comparison of fig. 4 (left) with fig. 5, which maps only the work travels with traditional data sources (Istat 2001), clearly shows the inconsistency of the boundaries, especially in the North, due not only to the temporal distance of the reference data (2012 vs 2001), but also to the information available with the data sources (daily mobility vs work-travel).

In the Milan Urban Region "only" the 56% are one-way job or study-related travels; while the mobility for personal reasons, for shopping and leisure, increases.

Further analysis focused on the correlation between the intensity of telephone calls at certain times of the day with the spatial configuration of residents and workers in the Milan urban region. The outcomes showed that telephone traffic data could effectively help to represent and to describe, dynamically over time, the intensity of activities and the presence of temporary populations at the urban scale.

A statistical processing (spatial clustering) of the Erlang data, aimed at extrapolate the recursive trends over the period considered (Manfredini, F.; Pucci, P.; Secchi, P.; Tagliolato, P.; Vantini, S.; Vitelli, V., 2012), has allowed us to build maps on the spatial distribution of the intensity of mobile phone traffic and the amenities of the area (presence of infrastructures, services and different activities). The results return new time-varying maps of the Milan Urban Region. At the same time, they allow to place in space some different “communities of practices” that use, with different temporality and purposes, the urban spaces.

Describing the trends of use of the urban spaces, the maps of mobile phone data give important information for mobility policies: the lack of coincidence between the mobility practices in the peak hours in the morning and in the afternoon when the chains of displacements are very articulate and complex, allows to recognize not only the variability in mobility practices, but also the places where these practices are occurring.

The commuters between 8 am and 9 am, become city users between 5 pm and 7 pm. This phenomenon strictly affects land use and can pose new questions and indications for transport policy. The variability in the space-time of use of urban spaces resulting by mobile phone data is also revealed by: • the spaces of daily mobility during working days (morning and evening rush hour, fig. 6, left, right resp.); • the spaces of night leisure that define a geography of places densely crowded at Saturday night (fig. 7, left), that is quite different from the territories of night work during the week (Monday to Friday night) (fig. 7, right); • the shopping and leisure spaces during the weekend (between 10 am and 8 pm) show the inner city center of Milan and the western part of the city, but not the commercial malls along the ring roads that they won’t seem to have a very remarkable weight in the Saturday practices (fig. 8).

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Figure 3: Aggregated flows of mobile phone users: 2011-10-19 – 9:00-11:00 am (left, from top to bottom), 5:00-7:00pm (right, from top to bottom)

Figure 4: Daily mobility Milan sphere of influence obtained by mobile phone data (left) and institutional boundaries for the management of Local public transport (right)

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Figure 5: Daily work travels Milan sphere of influence obtained by Istat data (2001)

Figure 6: Daily mobility spaces :morning map (left), evening map (right). Source: MOX/DiAP on Telecom Italia data

Figure 7: Night life spaces (left) and night work spaces (right). Source: MOX/DiAP on Telecom Italia Data

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Figure 8: Shopping and leisure spaces (Saturday, 10 am – 8 pm). Source: MOX/DiAP on Telecom Italia data

Final remarks The production of maps through mobile data and other digital sources, in many cases exceeds the real capacity of them to provide information useful for the urban policies. Often, the maps seem to have a value in itself, rather than representing a tool for reading and interpreting processes.

The ease in the production of the maps by mobile phone data, but more generally by digital sources, offers a lot of views and animations whose communicative potential is clear, much less are the uses of these maps to describe and represent urban practices.

Our research allowed us to test the potential of mobile phone data in explaining relevant urban usage and mobility patterns at the Milan urban region scale and in understanding the dynamic of temporary populations, two important topics that can be hardly intercepted through traditional data sources.

The presented data and methodology let the recognition of effective mobile populations in the urban environment. This knowledge can be exploited by decision makers for the definition of specific policies directed to temporary populations, which are more and more important in contemporary cities, otherwise ignored.

The same data help us to question some interpretations in the literature on the erratic behaviors of metropolitan populations, on the nomadism that characterizes the contemporary practices, that surveys on mobile phone data have already undertaken (Gonzalez, M. C., Hidalgo, C. A. and BarabĂĄsi, A.-L., 2008). Some research about a significant sample of mobile phone data have, in fact, contested interpretations of nomadism of contemporary populations.

If they confirm the high density of commuting, they also show the strong recursion of the paths. In other words we move more during the day, but according to the known and usual paths. Far from an analytical determinism that allows to photograph the reality of the practices in the urban spaces with mobile phone sources, our preliminary reflections want to explore the potentialities of these new data source, beyond the production of suggestive maps. More specifically, we have tried to understand the possible applications of these data in explaining the spatial dimension of varying practices that have great impacts on the densities of use of the city and its services.

This implies to consider the phone traffic data as the effect of behaviors and individual habits that become an indirect information on the characteristics of the territory and, somehow, an intrinsic feature of it, that changes in time. This study therefore suggests that mobile phone-network data have the potential to drastically change the way we view and understand the urban environment. Secondly, it explores whether mobile network data can reveal the significant time- dependent variation, which is missing from traditional analysis and can thus describe cities dynamically over time.

A further conclusion is that urban planning competences, with specific knowledge on urban dynamics, are needed to correctly interpret mobile phone data and to characterize and map urban contexts and their occupants, as emerged from interviews with different stakeholders, belonging to private and public sectors, with

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which also future applications have been discussed (event management, civil protection, mobility monitoring, urban rhythms analysis and mapping).

References Acebillo, J., Martinelli A. (2012), New urban metabolism, Actar, Barcelona.

Ahas, R., Mark, Ü. (2005), Location based services–new challenges for planning and public administration?. Futures 37(6), pp. 547–561.

Brunner, P. H. (2007), Reshaping Urban Metabolism. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 11(2), pp.11-13.

Estebe, P. (2008), Gouverner la ville mobile, PUF, Paris. 13.

Gonzalez, M. C., Hidalgo, C. A. and Barabási, A.-L. (2008), Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature 453 (7196), pp. 779–782.

Manfredini, F.; Pucci, P., Tagliolato P. (2012), “Mobile phone network data. new sources for urban studies? ” in Borruso G., Bertazzon S., Favretto A., Murgante B., Torre C.M. (eds.) Geographic Information Analysis for Sustainable Development and Economic Planning: New Technologies. Hershey PA, USA: IGI Global 11.

Manfredini, F.; Pucci, P.; Secchi, P.; Tagliolato, P.; Vantini, S.; Vitelli, V. (2012), Treelet decomposition of mobile phone data for deriving city usage and mobility pattern in the Milan urban region. MOX Report 25/2012 12.

Ratti, C., Pulselli, R. M., Williams, S. and Frenchman, D. (2006), Mobile landscapes: using location data from cell phones for urban analysis. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 33(5), pp.

727–748.

Reades, J., Calabrese, F., Sevtsuk, A. and Ratti, C. (2007), Cellular census: Explorations in urban data collection. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6(3), pp. 30– 38.

Sevtsuk, A. and Ratti, C. (2010). Does urban mobility have a daily routine? learning from the aggregate data of mobile networks. Journal of Urban Technology 17(1), pp. 41–60.

Soto and Frias-Martinez (2011), Automated land use identification using cell-phone records. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM international workshop on MobiArch, pp. 17–22. ACM. Soto and Frias-Martinez, (2011b), Robust land use characterization of urban landscapes using cell phone data. The First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA).

Wolman, A. (1965), The metabolism of cities. Scientific American 213(3), pp. 179–190.

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Learning from places: ICTs for EXPO2015 in the Turin-Milan region Andrea Rolando

Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies Email: andrea.rolando@polimi.it

Tijana Djordjevic Politecnico di Milano Email: tijanaklara@yahoo.com

Assuming that: • personal communication devices may enhance the interaction between people and places; • Milano will host Expo 2015, where is envisaged a pervasive use of ICTs, with the risk of virtual experience prevailing over the real one; • it is important to learn from places that directly exhibit some Expo themes, experiencing them and promoting among inhabitants and visitors their value as commons.

• the territories in-between Torino and Milano are a complex region, that don’t benefit directly from EXPO, but where the Event itself can contribute to a better relationship between cities, farmland and infrastructures in a unique agricultural landscape.

The paper will presents results from research activities and from Alta Scuola Politecnica projects, to explain how the concepts of “mapping” and that of “interface” applied on these territories can enhance: • the relationship between place and information in a broader sense; • the use of ICTs as driver of territorial innovation.

Keywords: Expo 2015, smart region, place making, situated cognition, mapping, sensors

Introduction This paper is aiming at investigating some possible new relationships between places and knowledge in the age of information technologies, using as study case the event of Expo that will take place in 2015 in Milan. More generally, the interest is focused on the role that ICTs can play as a driver of territorial innovation and how they can contribute to spatial quality of places.

In this sense, it is useful to start assuming some facts that characterize the present situation in general and the context of Milan in particular:

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• personal communication devices may enhance the interaction between people and places, and possibly be considered as drivers of territorial innovation, with relevant effects on spatial planning and on urban design issues; • Milan will host a new kind of Expo, where the experience of the event's themes (feeding the planet, energy for life) will be based also on pervasive use of ICTs, with the risk that virtual experience might prevail over the real one; • beyond the area of the event, in the territories around Milan there are many places that correspond precisely to such themes, in a sort of open air museum where are located “natural” expo pavilions (farms, agricultural landscapes, often of very high historical and cultural value), often not recognized even by the populations that live in these same territories.

Therefore, it could be relevant that Expo visitors or tourists who will come to Milano as “outsiders” may experience the event themes by learning directly from places and landscapes where agriculture is deeply integrated with history, the populations and food culture. The relationship between the “outsiders” and the “insiders”, as stakeholders who live in the territory before and after the event, is essential to better understand the meaning and value as commons of the places where the expo themes actually are more evident and real. To choose a case study, among the many territories surrounding Milan, those of the complex region facing west towards Turin are enriched by some very remarkable features. These landscapes don’t benefit directly from EXPO, but the Event itself could produce positive effects, contributing to a better relationship between cities, farmland and facilities in a unique agricultural landscape, crossed by a bundle of infrastructures, mainly related to highways and high speed train lines, but that coexist also with a system of rivers and canals of capital importance for the agricultural system and of great potential in terms of touristic exploitation, particularly in a “green economy” vision.

Therefore, if places are sources of the knowledge that is embodied in the places themselves, it becomes more and more relevant the understanding of how can we make such knowledge accessible in a better and deeper way, what relationship this process can open to innovative territorial uses and practices, if this can improve spatial quality and better services and finally understand if and how, in our particular case, all these issues could be better achieved through the use of ICTs. Of course, it is worth to consider that the techniques available in the field of ICTs applied to site related information, ranging from QR codes to Location Based Services or Augmented Reality applications are quite diffused. Hence, we are not going to comment here about their effectiveness, which can be considered quite reliable and mature, especially if we see how they are already applied in some renowned sites, few in numbers but already recognized as important and consequently provided with all the services, information and accessibility corresponding to their territorial role.

Rather, we would concentrate our attention, in first instance, on the role that ICTs can play when they are applied on contexts where the places of interest may be more numerous and diffused as part of a network but less attractive elements if taken as single. It could so be possible to understand if, assuming the fact that each of these places are anyway meaningful in themselves and even more if considered as a network of places, the implementation of the use of ICTs can help to rebalance the territorial conditions between places that are already attractive and those that could potentially be so, and so if the ICTs could become decisive as a true driver of territorial innovation and give better chances to meet the needs (in terms of services, spatial quality etc.) both of the inhabitants and of the tourists of Expo and post-Expo, so to give to a wider range of stakeholders a positive legacy after the event.

In this sense, a more general research question has to be posed, if we look at the territory as a network of physical nodes (places, with the whole meaning we can attribute to the word) that can be similar to the digital nodes of internet, not by chance called sites, a word that has gained a virtual sense only in the last decades. Considering the latest developments of cognitive disciplines and of knowledge itself, that are more and more based on a kind of virtual and hypertextual approach, we can ask if it is meaningful to

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translate such a virtual cognition model in an analog process of knowledge which should instead be strongly based on physical experience of places. Such a practical and physical approach, based upon real frequentation of places with their physical qualities and their embodied meaning, eventually retrieved and enriched by ICTs, would result in a literal and richer interpretation of the "situated cognition" theories, well known among scholars in the field of educational psychology. Places could in this sense be considered as sort of analogic internet sites, to be "clicked" through direct experience enhanced by ICTs in order to get from and through them information that becomes knowledge. Moreover, such an approach could enrich with meaning and add value to places, and thus bring their inhabitants to a higher sense of belonging to the places themselves. This could result as a truly important legacy of the Expo event.

This contribution also refers to research activities currently going on in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies1 and resumes some results from one of the last Alta Scuola Politecnica projects. These projects aim at studying how to encourage the direct experience of places that are related to Expo 2015 themes, by enhancing the relationship between a specific site and the knowledge (not merely information) that can be related to it, by understanding how this topic could be addressed by implementing new applications for mobile terminals and innovative uses of devices for the interaction between objects (or places) and users. Assuming that Expo 2015 is a relevant opportunity to accumulate specific multidisciplinary knowledge concerning a territorial context (the region between Milan and Turin) and a broad set of topics, oriented to the understanding and evaluation of the complex effects of the preparation, realization and legacy of the Event, the project will mainly rely on two different disciplinary realms. On one side, urban planning in order to model the spaces with their spatial qualities and the opportunities for innovative uses; on the other side, ICTs to understand how these representations could be retrieved and shown on user terminals, both fixed and mobile.

The area of interest is that of the metropolitan and regional scale, taking into specific account the so called in-between places: between city and countryside, between the main centres of the Region, between the Expo site in Milan and the hinterland, especially in the agricultural landscape where an exceptionally rich network of canals (with canale Cavour as a backbone 2), interacts with the agricultural uses and with the different requirements given by the compresence of the infrastructural bundle connecting Turin and Milan. These are places where some of the Expo themes are more clearly evident and where, at the same time, the need of an economic, social and physical reorganization is more pressing.

To provide the necessary information, referring to the two disciplinary contexts stated above, the concepts of “mapping” and that of “interface” are essential, as it is not yet theoretically and practically clear how to fit regional scale information onto mobile terminals of limited dimension, defined by ergonomic criteria, especially when we consider that such mobile terminals have to incorporate information that refer to two different kinds of approaches: 1. top-down, that correspond to the design intentions of authorized actors and that they need to refer to “from above” wide scale abstract visions of collective interest; 2. bottom-up, that correspond to specific services provided to single final users, and that must be supported by "site specific" information, meaning that they are related to the near, concrete context and that they must be defined according to inclusive, socially participated processes.

The main outcome of this project is therefore related to the design of interfaces between users and information available in the territory (provided by sensors or from other data sources, including social communities and people who live in the territory). Such interfaces should be adaptative and designed on a site-specific approach, able to be physically integrated to places so to enhance their imageability (quoting Kevin Lynch) and consequently increase their attractiveness. Methods of analysis oriented to provide

Research program between the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (A. Rolando and C. Morandi, with S. Di Vita) and Telecom Italia (F. Faraci, M. Turolla, A. Bragagnini) “The smart region between Turin and Milan: mobile services as driver of territorial innvoation for Expo 2015”, 2012-2013 2 The canals network could be used as a slow mobility – bicycle connection between Turin and Milan, highly accessible also by the highway and the regional railways system 1

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traditional and digital services and to experiment the possibility to use information and design tools based on gps tracking technologies could also find further development through this project.

One relevant aspect that should be further developed is related to the use of sensors useful to diffuse site information and visitors' perception of some specific character of places (i.e. when the rice fields are flooded, if there is fog along a touristic route, what are the conditions of a cycle path etc.). These devices could enhance the process of “listening” of the landscape and be positively integrated also onto procedures of touristic information, for instance starting from information produced by processes that are becoming more and more diffused in the agricultural sector, such those related to the use of gps and other sensors applied in the techniques so called of precision farming. For instance, the information about the level of growth of a cultivation could at the same time be interesting from the touristic point of view, as explained below when reporting of the ASP E-scape project. In this sense, by relating places with the information, in other words “learning from places”, if information becomes knowledge, also the meaning of an often abused term like "internet of things" could be augmented and deepened, as explained in this introductory text, by defining a neologism like "internet of places". It should be therefore be possible to combine in a positive way the spatial and quality issues of the many places that make our landscape so rich and the further enrichment, related to the attribution of visibility (and importance) that is today given by innovative uses of information and communication technologies.

E-SCAPE research project Telecommunication infrastructural networks and use of ICT are supposed to afford users higher efficiency in real-time information system applied in the sectors of environment, society and economy.

Besides, digital infrastructures enable the territories to collect, process and distribute helpful data from cloud resources and sensors towards displaying them to the users. For instance, creation of innovative and smart territorial services, it should base on the territorial ability to allow obtainment of significant and combined information with the contribution of collaborative bottom-up users. In addition, smart use of territory is essentially presenting the practice of sustainable use of resources considering protection of local identities, landscape and natural heritage.

Moreover, these spatial ICT upgrades are having impact on the way in which the spaces within the territory are used and experienced, opening up new reality in which physical space ‘filled’ with information could be presented on a personal communication device. Though, the practice of adjusting the world to its need and filling the surroundings with signs toward better orientation, it is a part of human culture and nature. Nowadays the environment is filled by signs, knowledge, history but these were previously incorporated in acceptable social world through physical forms of churches, libraries, schools, theatres, museums. However, digital communication is changing the way in which contemporary knowledge, stories or metaphors are flowing and establishing in social reality. Still, the comprehensiveness of the powerful relation between digital and physical perspective is under exploration and “E-SCAPE” research project suggested a fruitful research methodology with possibility to be tested during the EXPO event. Again, a term like "internet of places" could provide a contemporary interpretation to the traditional spatial and cultural interpretation of the places.

Purpose of “E-SCAPE”, joined research project of Alta Scuola Politecnica3 and Telecom Italia was discovering the innovative methodology for use of ICT as a driver for territorial change within the Mi-To urban region, specifically concentrate on the “in-between” territories along the regional backbone of Canale Cavour. The main objective of “E-SCAPE” project was to conduct a multidisciplinary study of the territory in between Milan and Turin and to figure out an innovative application for smartphone- [e]scApp, taking into account the challenges that the territory is going to face as the big catalyst event (Expo2015). Accordingly, [e]-scApp was based on the two most important aspects: it integrates electronic 3

Academic institution in partnership between the two main Italian technical universities, Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino; it involves talented students with different backgrounds to develop multidisciplinary projects with external partners.

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[e] tools into the landscape towards its enhancement, through the smartphone Application service that is the final research project outcome.

The design process gave the emphasis to particular topics. Before all, the focus was on the idea of creating smart community able to re-enhance the territory and to encourage the physical experience integration with information flow and already existing data sources, to be available to users. Secondly, [e]-scApp was dedicated to re-establishing strong relationships between people and places through the use of technology.

While ongoing practices of ICT uses are increasing the gap between its users and physical spaces by creation of cyber spaces, the innovative approach of [e]-scApp is proposal of situated cognition service requiring strong relationship between people and places in exploring and gaining experiences and knowledge.

Figure 1. E-scape key concepts

To achieve a better understanding of the [e]-scApp solution produced by E-Scape research project, it is necessary to remind the problem setting that the project is referring to.

An in-depth analysis demonstrates territorial unbalances concerning both material (hardware) and immaterial (software) issues. For instance, hardware aspects are on one hand challenged by a complex infrastructural system, including both long fast connections (high-speed railways and highways) between Milan and Turin and slow short connections between the minor poles (old railways and secondary roads).

Thus, this particular unbalanced infrastructural system is contributing to the formation of strong bipolar structure across the study area leading to the marginalization of intermediate territories. Besides, referring to the software aspect, unbalances are identified in availability of diverse forms of data and information flows, which are complementary determining different intensity in services’ provision. To be more clear,

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the lack of immaterial services could be evidently identified by comparing the Milan and Turin highdensity metropolitan contexts with the "in-between" territories.

In addition, the project solution reflects the issue of enhancing and promotion of under exploited territorial opportunities as well as their relevant intrinsic value. In particular the Mi-To region, with its cultural heritage, productive fabric and typical agricultural landscape could present a wide range of places to be rediscovered and promoted during the EXPO 2015 event. Indeed, exhibitions and events are the common instruments to distribute informal planning practices. However, the actual situation tends to exclude these "in-between" territories both from touristic and information channels and from the main systems of accessibility (both physical, in terms of transportation and virtual, in terms of information).

In answering these problems, project solution was based on a bottom-up approach giving an active role to users. Through a direct users’ contribution and involvement of new dynamics, we strongly believe that a rebalance of the territory might occur. Therefore, the participation as practice is fundamental for project solution aimed to promote the territorial enhancement, significantly considering its users and not only top-down and theoretical approach.

Figure 2. Interfacing space- TOP-DOWN, BOTTOM- UP approach

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Figure 3. Recommender system filtering

Considering the needs pointed out in the previous analysis sections, [e]-scApp smartphone app is planned to provide users different experiencing modalities of the territory and to allow them in discovering all its opportunities offered in a smart way. The app has therefore two main perspectives. The first one is concerning the users and the territorial offer, thus the new practice can easily be discovered while corresponding with user’s interest (through recommender system filtering (Figure 3 Recommender system filtering). The second opportunity allows users to contribute to the participative mapping process and to implement the territory system intelligence by suggesting new points and paths that they believe are important (Figure 4 BOTTOM UP mapping).

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Figure 4. BOTTOM UP mapping

Moreover, this interaction enables creation of bottom-up map focused on the users' perception of the territory. A fundamental and innovative aspect of the app is the application of a situated cognition model in physical space exploration, requiring user to be actually present on the territory to entirely benefit of app functionalities. Accordingly, chosen approach is increasing the relevance of the physical space and contributes to its enhancement through the use of proximity technologies in the spatial context. The accomplishment of innovative project aspects is explained in following: • creation of instant social community between people that share similar interests on the territory (Figure 5 Instant social community on the territory) • promotion of local opportunities in term of heritage, traditions and local excellences; • creation of users’ support through offering proposals about enjoying the possibilities available within the territory ( Figure 6 Users support – enjoying possibilities within the territory) • creation of a logic in charge of collecting data about the use of territory in a bottom-up logic.

In addition, a collaborative community made up of active users interested in wandering and exploring the landscape, living and enjoying the territory, could determine new physical and immaterial flows of people and information, also useful towards the rebalancing of the current situation. So, promoting the territorial strengths through the use of technology both by local inhabitants and tourists, could reduce the physical distance between intermediate territories and main poles. Besides, [e]-scApp is able to generate data about users’ preferences, their moving within the territory as well as territorial evaluation. In addition, this data

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output could suggest important issues to compare in the eventually further project phases regarding both territorial and service advancement.

Considering a wider perspective, this research project aims at contextualizing the concept of smart city in the more suitable and diffused context of the smart region, challenging the territorial reactions through smart concept advantages. Besides, considering them as enabling tools, ICTs add value to the project by facilitating the sharing and dissemination of new experiences and offering statistical documentations in order to understand new dynamics. Even though new social behaviors occur within the physical spaces, they are fully based on immaterial tools and their operations. Therefore, these new perspectives are positioning ICT as a territorial driver of physical changes, also opening up the possibility of territorial development, new planning practices and participatory processes.

Finally, this attempt of using technology based on new social behaviors to drive physical changes and to create new values, movements and data dynamics, approaches the concrete problems of Mi-To region, but at the same time, [e]-scApp is a tool that could potentially allow a repetition in other contexts suffering from similar territorial and informational fragmentations.

Figure 5. Instant social community on the territory and BOTTOM-UP data collection Figure 6. Users support- enjoying possibilities within the territory

Figure 7. e-scape products (swapping contributions between hardware and software)

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References E-scape team, (2012), E-scape Multidisciplinary project final report, Alta Scuola Politecnica, Principal academic tutor: A. Rolando DiAP Polimi, External partner: Telecom Italia, A. Bragagnini.

Rolando A., (2011), Torino e Milano: territori intermedi e spazi aperti come opportunitĂ di sviluppo di una smart region, in De Magistris, A., Rolando, A., a cura di (2011), Torino Milano: prospettive territoriali per una cooperazione competitiva, in Atti e Rassegna Tecnica, 3-4, SIAT - SocietĂ degli Ingegneri e degli Architetti in Torino.

Rolando A., Scandiffio A. (2013) Milan-Turin: a bundle of infrastructures to access a network of places, between cultural heritage and landscape. In: AA.VV. Proceedings of S.A.V.E. Heritage, XI International Forum le vie dei Mercanti. Capri-Napoli. La Scuola di Pitagora.

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Discussion Forums about the city Images, texts and representation at an urban scale Matteo Giuseppe Romanato Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies E-mail: matteoromanato@tiscali.it

The main topic of this research is the image of contemporary cities (intended in a wide sense and so including not only pictures but also comments, plans, schemes, patterns and proposals) posted in the web communities.

The concepts and the ideas diffused by the web have already been faced quite in depth by sociology, psychology, media and communication experts but it is a relatively new topic in urban research. The great importance of the participation of common people to on-line discussions (forums) comes from the production of the so called “User generated content�. This is a very important amount of material that can be used to understand what citizenship thinks about city, urban life and space. This bottom-up urban ideology can be typically rescued through the discussions about the new urban projects of transformation which aroused a great interest on the web. The methodology used to analyze the on-line material and the related authors involves the reading of texts and the classifying of images to find out some recurrent issues or basic frames. Moreover a qualitative approach must imply a direct contact with the web users by interviews and questionnaires. A first conclusion of this work-in-progress seems to outline from one side a gap between the disciplinary critical knowledge and the current web-based opinions and from another side the presence of a request by some web users of an hyper-dense, high rising and sometimes decontextualized city probably due to the specific web-generated imagery.

Keywords: on line community, urban transformation, image of the city

1. Introduction The purpose of my research is to inquire into the ideas and the visions about contemporary cities and nowadays urban transformations as they emerge from the discussion forums on the internet. The importance of involving citizenship in planning and decision making about urban transformations and landscape preservation is nowadays well accepted as an issue and a pre-condition of an aware design of space based on the social consent. Most of the interest is obviously turned to the population of stakeholders as the people that would have more reason to be opponent or supporter of a specific project. But in my opinion a large part of people spread all over the city (or even in the suburbs), that are not directly touched by plans or projects, just have an opinion about them and about the city as a whole. This set of ideas can be very

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interesting, if not immediately, at least in a long time perspective. The way of thinking contemporary city in fact should be taken into account and analyzed as a general background from which planning activity can have help or handicap. From this point of view the web communities give us an excellent opportunity to detect a sometimes not very visible substratum of thoughts, wishes and expectations.

2. Research context The world wide web nowadays can be considered as a mass media due to its capability to reach a great amount of people at least in advanced countries. It is also well known since the nineties that the role of mass media is to produce the social memory and the knowledge from which every communication can start (Luhmann N., 1996). This is an issue clearly referred to the traditional mass media society but with the development of the web society new forms of sociality could grown under the shape of an on-line-network around individual choices, preferences or interests. These people associations can be considered, in a renewed sense, “communities” as well. The key point is that virtual communities must not be necessarily seen as less significant or intense than the off-line ones (Castells M., 2001). If on-line communities shape culture and memory for themselves (and for society as a whole) we can ask ourselves: what kind of culture (images, narrations etc…) is this? And in which way do these communities work? The starting point is considering this new kind of culture as a participative culture due to its bottom-up proceeding: the so called “grassroot” phenomenon (Jenkins, H., 2006). It is also very important here to recall the emerging of a fundamental feature of this web-based production which is the so called “peer production” that involves people in free association without hierarchical guidance or authority-based frame (Benkler Y., 2006). In parallel with this recent developments a great attention was given in the last years to the issue of file sharing against the “commodification” of culture” (Lessig L., 2004) with cases such as the free software and the open source. So the issue of the user-generated content, involving especially images and videos (Burgess J., Green J., 2009), is under debate as a new form of culture able to shape our ideas.

3. Case study The case study that can help us to understand the way in which the web communities can produce and spread images and text on the internet is taken from a group of forums quite developed in the last five years: skyscrapercity.com. This is a set of forum that regards the entire world and focuses its attention especially on urban transformation projects. Every discussion forum (or better threads) is, less or more, about one single project although sometimes they can be split into more sub-threads when a project takes different paths of construction or it is to wide to be accurately followed by the users. A zoning of the posts concerning Italy among north, centre, south and islands shows a quite predictable leadership of the north for the number of threads (discussion forums) in parallel with the number of projects in progress (Table1).

Regions:

Number of Threads

Number of posts

North

157

153.291

Centre

44

74.529

South and islands

51

131.940

Total

252

359.760

Figure 1. Zooning of threads and posts in Italy.

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But what is more important it is the great number of post including comments, images replies and so on.

Anyway among all the forums one of the most frequented is the Milan one also due to the great number of large scale projects recently designed and in course of realization in this city. Interventions such as “Citylife”, “Porta Nuova”, “Varesine”, “Palazzo Lombardia” gather a lot of users on the web (Figure 1) around the monitoring of the building yards, the possible variations from the original design, the time lags on the scheduled plan, the reaction of neighbourhood against the realizations and the foreseeing of the final outcome in comparison with the original design.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Italy-centred forums.

The quantity and variety of the participations in the forums about Milan can so offer a case study with a remarkable material. It is in fact evident that the large interest about these urban transformations shows a phenomenon that must be studied.

4. Approach According to Barabási the world wide web is a network with a scale invariance (Barabási A., 2002) which means that, although the web is expanding time after time, the number of nodes really important is constant.

It is quite clear that not all the users have the same role in a web community: someone is more active (it posts more comments, more images and gains more reliability among the others). But this is not to be considered as a limit because, just to make an example, the more expert users often spur the others to improve their engagement and capabilities (Ito M. et al., 2009). This is also a typical aspect of forums (or blog as well). Not all the users are at the same level but the more active ones do have a role in listening, expressing doubt, rescuing materials, proposing and accepting themes of discussion. In other words they can collect opinions, synthesize, shape discussions and orient the threads. These “influencers” can be so easily put in relation with the well-known “two-steps-flow of communication” theory (Lazarsfeld P., Berelson B.,Gaudet H., 1944) according to which in a communicating process there is not just a linear relation between a message and its reception. It is so clear that in this case a quantitative method can not be just the proper, or better the unique, way to detect what is going on in a forum. The most recent suggestion about the analysis of the web media quite agree about the importance of this source, for example to prevent viral communications that can produce image damages to corporations. But they also agree that in case of blogs or forums a qualitative analysis must be considered as a specific tool for these particular kinds of communication networks (Chieffi D., 2012). So a series of contacts and semi-structured interviews (Figure 2) is needed. An inquiry on the relationship of the users with the web, on their education and sentiment of citizenship, on their concepts of space and images through questions can reveal important aspects about this population. Besides this a direct analysis of the posts (including images, texts, maps and so on) can support a better constructed methodological approach to such a vast panorama of data.

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Figure 2. Example of questionnaire.

5. Outcomes The outcome of this survey is a collection of ideas and images about urban projects with a great interest for a researcher. First of all users monitor the building yards sometimes every day with photos. In the consequent discussions many of the questions referred to the photos are about technical details, times of realization, links between the images and the plan but also about the possible final result if equal or different from the original design. One of the most quoted preoccupations is, for example, about the highness of the building at the end of the intervention. Another very important element is the reference to international environments. Often it is in fact possible to find quotation (through text or images) to similar intervention in foreign countries as a comparison point with Milan buildings under construction. Many of the photos are taken just to show elements of interest strictly focused on part of the buildings or the small area more than on the relationship with the context anyway. Although the main urban transformations can collect the majority of posts and followers almost every little area with a foreseen project is scheduled as well. But it is pretty curious that among this large selection of projects there is not a great interest for green spaces such as parks, gardens an so on. This even though in the recent past Milan has foreseen green spaces and international competitions about them such as the Forlanini park (formerly won by Gonรงalo Byrne) which now still has great problems in its starting. By the analysis data it is important to report the average portrait of the users. Among the different characteristics we can outline the profile of people with a quite good education level and with a discrete social position. Their background does not necessarily involve technical training or specific education. Anyway they are perfectly informed about the debate on these areas: often they know the opponents and their topics, the building corporation activities, the political debate, the real estate market (figure 3) and the different architectonic contests in the world (including archi-stars works especially). Some of them have also interest in contemporary arts, industrial design and a general attraction for fashion world and upper class lifestyle. Finally many of them are Milan-based but usually they are not just strictly in the neighbourhood of the area taken into the discussion.

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Figure 3. Newspaper cutting about real estate marked posted in the forum

6. Possible interpretations The portrait of the followers is quite complex to consider. But first of all it is quite clear they are not just ingenuous. Even when they support the main speculative intervention with high intensity of cubature it is not so easy to reduce them to simple victims of urban marketing. Their level of awareness about local and international transformations process is not so low to be considered na誰ve without further explanation. They are, on the opposite, sometimes quite skilful personalities, and the quality of their home made renderings (although not very precise or correctly dimensioned) is an evidence of a certain ability to get in some way inside the projects. And this is in order to look for elements that are not clearly evident at first sight. The average of their cultural experiences is not certainly restricted to their birthplace city and their images scenario and iconic frame can be considered, if not wide, al least in deep going in their interest. Concerning this we can report that the source of their information is more based on visual elements and less on critical texts and specific books. Anyway most of these web-users have often no strict interest or benefit in the process of urban transformation and planning and do not have a disciplinary background about architecture or planning.

Therefore we can consider their products at least as an unselfish outcome of a great interest in their environment. This sort of local pride for the city can be registered as a positive element and also as an emotional and intellective involvement. As a consequence of this engagement the users find a strong stimulation to get inside specific problems such as building yard questions (Figure 4).

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Figure 4. Photo of Garibaldi-Repubblica area in transformation.

In fact we can say that what they know about technical details is rescued on the net. There is so a sort of specific training on-line based on autonomous research but moreover on the dialogue with other users in a self-building process inside the community. The support for high rise buildings and a hyper-dense city that refers to international metropolis or even megalopolis can be seen in some way as a visual and spatial parallel of the debate about “apocalyptic” and “integrated” mass media public. In short words the “integrated” are people who perceive enthusiastically the mass media communication as a social resource to inform, educate and entertain citizens (Eco U., 1964). The users could in fact be enrolled among them thanks to the typical influence of their specific and deep relationship with new technology and web-media.

7. Conclusions The survey of the web forums about the city image can be considered as an important analysis of a specific ideology which is nowadays spreading among very interested and motivated users. The approach to this phenomenon could point out some interesting outcomes: interest for city transformations, admiration for high rise building, attraction for international experiences, indifference for urban context and appreciation of building density. It is possible to find positive elements such as the interest for urban development, the incentive to understand specific technical problems, the pursuit of images and reference not restricted to a local environment, the necessity of comparison with foreign examples and so on. But also problematic issues such as the undervaluation of the urban context, the lack of critical approach, sometime the self-referential evaluation and little familiarity with the last developments of urban research.

In conclusion it is anyway possible to underline from one side a gap between the disciplinary criticism expressed by academics and the current opinions of, at least, a part of the web-related citizenship. From another side the presence of a particular way to conceive urban image due probably to the way of communicating and raising material on the web. Some possible suggestion both for design and for future work could so be a more specific attention to the way in which academic criticism reaches the public: probably books and publications are not enough to reach all the communities of interests and of practice.

Moreover another research issue concerns the necessity to investigate better the way these users build their critical approach and their imagery throughout specific communication channels, interactions and references.

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References Barabási A., (2002), Linked: The new science of networks, Perseus, Cambridge. Trad. It. (2004) Link. La scienza delle reti, Einaudi, Torino.

Benkler Y., (2006), The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom, Yale university Press, New Haven Conn. Trad It. (2007) La ricchezza della rete. La produzione sociale trasforma il mercato e aumenta le libertà, Università Bocconi, Milano.

Burgess J., Green J., (2009), YouTube. Online video and participatory culture, Polity Press, Cambridge. Trad. It. (2009) YouTube, Egea, Milano.

Castells M., (2001), Internet Galaxy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Trad. It. Galassia Internet, Feltrinelli, Milano.

Chieffi D., (2012), Social media relations. Comunicatori e communities, influencers e dinamiche sociali nel web. Le P.R. on line nell’era di facebook, twitter e blog, Il sole 24 ore, Milano.

Eco U., (1964), Apocalittici e integrati: comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa, Bompiani, Milano.

Ito M. et al., (2009), Hanging out, messing around, geeking out: Living and learning with the new media, Mit Press, Cambridge Mass.

Jenkins, H., (2006), Fans, Bloggers and gamers. Exploring participatory cultures, New York University Press, New York. Trad It. (2008) Fan, Blogger and video-gamers. L’emergere delle culture participative nell’era digitale, Angeli, Milano.

Lazarsfeld P., Berelson B.,Gaudet H., (1944), The people’s choice. How the voter makes his mind in a presidential campaign, Columbia University Press, New York.

Lessig L., (2004), Free culture. How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Luhmann N., (1996), Die Realität des Massenmedien, Westdeutscher Verlag GmbH, Opladen. Trad. It. (2000) La realtà dei mass media, Franco Angeli, Milano.

Penguin books, New York. Trad It. (2005) Cultura Libera. Un equilibrio tra anarchia e controllo, contro l’estremismo della proprietà intellettuale, Apogeo, Milano.

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A multitude of use-values Is digital media informing current dynamics of production of public space?

Rodrigo Andres Barrios Salcedo Bauhaus-Universität Weimar Faculty of Architecture E-mail: andbarrios@gmail.com.

Cities have been considered by different commentators, from Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, Stephen Graham, Kazys Varnelis and Jeffrey Inaba, amongst others, as a social-technological formation resulting from an exchange network made of goods, services and people. Currently, urban spaces are not only to be considered as containers of the digital infrastructure which further allows – and accelerates- such flows of capital, but as the very product of those digital media leveraging such infrastructure: social networks, blogs, geo-location platforms and so on. Such media are crossbreeds of new productive relationship within space. Thus, while space facilitates a new specific value, new social functions arise. Those messages posted by individuals through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, besides other online content platforms; render a rising mode of spatial production and consumption. This document’s working hypothesis is that digital media plays a role in contemporary processes of spatial production, as those qualities ‘performed’ all over a resulting space should be equally rendered all over these media. If such a hypothesis is demonstrated, we can conclude that digital media must give a detailed account of any spatial production process, and more specifically of the multitude of ‘use values’ attached to space via crowdsourcing.

It is the aim of this document to introduce a rationale of spatial interpretation; leveraging a public space which qualities have been featured all over social media networks. Such public space is located in London.

The data sets analyzed capture the volume of online conversations overtime related to the pop-up mall ‘Boxpark shoreditch’ located in southeast London.

Keywords: complex use value formation, political economy, digital content, space production, locational advantage.

1. Introduction According to Historical Materialist theory, once nature is socialized via its intervention it becomes what commentators on the field usually name as a ‘Second Nature’ - abiding to Marx’s definition (Marx, K. 2011), thus acquiring a set of particularities and possibilities which, from that

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very moment, sets it apart from the non-intervened, non-human realm. Nowadays, as rampant urbanization grows, the boundaries between produced spaces and the untouched, remnant natural frontiers are blurring. Such an event points to a materiality starting from the conjunction of Nature-Society; from now on ‘space’, as common ground where a series of ‘actants’ contribute to a continuously unfolding struggle with either nature-building and/or social-building functions (Latour,B. (2002; Latour, 1992 P.285). This struggle, in turn, renders by means of each of its singularities ‘the continuity and discontinuity of [the] historical development [of space]. (Santos, 1977 P. 4) Such an account reveals a series of structural adjustments of the modes of production, which endow space with differential values. Geographer Milton Santos (Santos, 1977) contributes succinctly in the definition of these differentials both as a method of study and as a theory of space, as he embraces previous elaborations on Socio-Economic Formation - SEF- by Marx and Engels, centering his discourse on how such category of study might help understanding ‘through their affiliation with a particular mode of production, the similarities among SEF’s’ reaching the point of ‘defining the specificity of each formation, what distinguishes it from others, and, inside the SEF, the grasp of the particular as a scission of the whole, a moment of the whole reproduced in one of its fractions’( Santos, 1977 P. 4).

Considering the current moment of history in regards to the consolidation of a postindustrial economy, more specifically to the shift towards digital production, it results unavoidable to inquiry how space - as socialized force of production - reacts to such structural adjustments, following Santos’ elaborations. Geographer Erik Swyngedouw is illustrative in elaborating that these differentials are increasingly the product of a space/technology nexus which has the potential of trigger spatial reconfigurations as new productive technologies emerge (Swyngedouw,1994). This insight, along with Latour’s elaborations on the Nature-Society conjunction [6] as the result of scientific and technological innovation (Latour, 1992 P.281), helps us shedding light over the fact that any moment or any particularity of the development of a social formation in space will reveal both the complexities triggered by such a nexus and the value those complexities deliver.

As we refer to the complexities behind social space, more specifically to the value of specific formations, the concept of complex use-value formation lies at the core of this elaboration, as social functions seem, rather than mediated, increasingly defined by technological innovation.

Complex use value formation in space, according to commentators on the subject, reveals the structural functioning of the mode of production under which they operate. According to Sociologist Christian Topalov, [7] urban space under capitalist mode of production can be catalogued as a ‘multitude of private processes of spatial appropriation, each of them determined via the valuation rules pertaining to each of the particular capitals’, which in turn are juxtaposed with a set of socialized forces of production and consumption, and with a capital on circulation (Topalov, 1976). What is commonly discussed by Topalov, Swyngedouw and other commentators such as Sociologist Edmond Preteceille (Preteceille, 1976) and Geographer David Harvey (Harvey, 1978) is that the formation of complex use values - and by extension socio economic formation, reflects a paradox within the capitalist mode of production by which the surplus value obtained by any capitalist from a locational effect has a positive correlation with the extent productive forces have been socialized, although spatial increases in productivity cannot come to effect unless the capitalist monopolizes- or ’ internalizes’, as mainstream economists may

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say- the effects derived from geographic location; that is, from the particularities of the complex use-value formation. [8] Now, in order to explore the theoretical effects of the advent of digital capitalism over the formation of complex use values in urban space, it is necessary to examine each of the material singularities involved in the process of enacting space as a socialized force of production, namely those determining production, circulation and consumption.

For the examination of each of these material categories, the following chart represents a social practice grid, which intends to give an account of the complex use value formation process. This is a development of a grid made by Harvey to represent social practice in the context of flexibilization of labor [9] (Harvey, 1990).

Figure 1. Spatial practice: an account of complex use value formation. Source: Barrios, 2013 according to Harvey,1990

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This graph can be conceived as an ‘update’ of Harvey’s observations in 1990. The goal of including this graph is of generating a map which allows for both the correct interpretation of sets of multiple processes folding through time and space that are imbued by technological innovation and for the account of a method to describe the current state of affairs of present dynamics of spatial formation resulting from the dialectic relationship of each of the categories described on it.

In order to correctly interpret this graph, it is necessary to attend his own explanation on the politics of representation of the diagram included, as follows: ‘Material spatial practice refer to the physical and material flows, transfers, and inter-actions that occur in and across space in such a way as to assure production and social reproduction.

Representations of space Encompass all of the signs and significations, codes and knowledge, that allow such material practices to be talked about and understood, no matter whether in terms of everyday common sense or through the sometimes arcane jargon of the academic disciplines that deal with spatial practices (engineering, architecture, geography planning, social ecology, and the like) Spaces of representation Are social inventions (codes, signs, and even material constructs such as symbolic spaces, particular built environments, paintings, museums and the like) that seek to generate new meanings or possibilities for spatial practices’ As he refers to the characterizations made by Lefebvre over the experienced, the perceived, and the imagined in regards to the Spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces ( Lefebvre, 1991 P. 33), he continuously elaborates on the dialectic relationship of each of these conceptual categories of space, while adding the following: ‘Across the top of the grid I list three other aspects to spatial practice drawn from more conventional understandings: Accessibility and distanciation speak to the role of the "friction of distance" in human affairs. Distance is both a barrier to and a defense against human interaction. It imposes transaction costs upon any system of production and reproduction (particularly those based on any elaborate social division of labor, trade, and social differentiation of reproductive functions). Distanciation is simply a measure of the degree to which the friction of space has been overcome to accommodate social interaction.

The appropriation of space examines the way in which space is used and occupied by individuals, classes, or other social groupings. Systematized and institutionalized appropriation may entail the production of territorially bounded forms of social solidarity.

The domination of space reflects how individuals or powerful groups dominate the organization and production of space so as to exercise a greater degree of control either over the friction of distance or over the manner in which space is appropriated by themselves or others.’ (Harvey, 1990 P.257-259).

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Now, I would like to give an account of the current status of the dynamics of formation of complex use values, which are impacted by the current shift from industrial to digital production.

Each of these phenomena results from the spatial practice of a series of ‘actants’ within the demands of present ethics of capitalist production, and can be somewhat traced with the help of Figure 1.

2. The current state of affairs within the paradox of capitalist urbanisation As mentioned by Swyngedouw quoting Marx, both the products of intensification and extensification of the use of space are quantified by means of a) the labor mass behind the intensification of the use of space which has the potential of generating cooperative labor b) the codes, the modes and the networks of cooperation generated by such a mass once the potential of cooperative labor is activated through the necessary social and technological means c) the scale economies rendered by the concretion of labor in the necessary - physical and intangibleinfrastructures and d) the reduction of the turnover time it takes for transactions to be made and, subsequently, for the capital to render surplus value (Swyngedouw, 1994. P. 426).

If this valences clearly seem to help describing the conformation of complex use values, its formation proves highly dependent of an ‘organic component’ which can be associated to social struggle - which, in turn, derives from the inner and external negotiations practiced by the labor mass behind. Social struggle is, thus, often regarded as a component ‘slowing’ its concretion, as noted by Swyngedouw on Preteceille’s La Planification Urbaine:Les contradictions de l’urbanisation capitaliste. (Preteceille, 1976 in Swyngedouw, 1994. P. 427).

As mentioned by Marx (2006), Preteceille (1976), Topalov (1976) and Swyngedouw (1994), paradoxes such as a) the shrinking of time circulation of capital as a benefit reaped by capitalists derived from the formation of complex use values in urban land which is, on the contrary, usually slow-paced, most of the times organically generated, unpredictable, as they derive from a set of actions which are dependent from social struggle and b) the struggle for the monopolization of the effects derived from the formation of complex use values lead by capitalists, which in turn results in the robust circulation of productive knowledge within labor force, thus socializing the productive forces which enabled a specific geography to become a force of production in the first place via informing the negotiations within labor mass and those performed with the capitalists in quantitative (amount of transactions generated and network formation, among others ) , and qualitative terms ( the content of the mentioned negotiations), introduce both specifically the discussion over complex use value formation into a dialectic mode where value-magnitudes such as time and capital experiment tensions exemplified in the context either of the contraction/expansion of surplus value turnover time or in the hoarding/sharing operations performed by the capitalists in regards to the efforts of internalization of the side-effects of cooperative labor. It is the working hypothesis of this document that labor mass performs a central role when it comes to evaluate the fluctuations of time and capital, taking into account that once social struggle via cooperative labor is assimilated as a productive force - meaning that is subject of internalization or monopolization - embodies a ‘tactical’ asset which ultimately may impact the rate of profit and/or turnover time positively.

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In theory, societies shifting from industrial to digital economies have concentrated the technological infrastructure necessary to keep on shrinking the turnover time it takes for capital to circulate (Castells, 2000). As these value- magnitudes, in such a context, start keeping the pace of high-frequency operations demanded by the current trading instruments from the financial markets- with incentives of turnover time reduction and increased rate of profit via exposure to risk capital, it is assumed by this document that the mentioned tensions within time and capital in regards to complex use values formation are increasing, as such value-magnitudes under the rationale of fixed capital investments are subject to a slower turnover time and seemingly unattractive low rates of profit. Therefore, they seem to provoke a crisis within the formation of complex use values in urban land which will look for correction either by slowing down the circulation of capital and bringing down the profit rates via less exposure to risk operations, or by synchronizing those products of cooperative labor defining the formation of complex use valuesthe very products of social struggle- with the pace of high frequency trading.

Now, such a distortion within the formation of complex use values in urban land is magnified not only in the sense of its exposure to high frequency investment operations assisted by complex algorithms, but due to the inner complexities of current social struggle, taking into account that the amount of negotiations taking place in any of the geographies which abide to societies shifting from industrial to digital labor and increasing mobility- global cities (Sassen, 2001) increases hand in hand with the exponentially increasing division of labor (Swyngedouw, 1994). This specific development leads to unique processes of complex use value formation, which are unprecedented and unpredictable, yet remaining subject to the ‘slow’ dynamics of organic complex use value formation.

3. Spatial practice, Network formation and social struggle in the realm of productive consumption Social space is not only the medium where social struggle via different sets of actions is taking place, but the very materialization of these: a complex geography made of 'objects' which are the result of an equally complex network of events and interactions within labor mass itself and beyond, including the interactions with the capitalists and the state, each of those with different valences and scales: '' social space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information” (Lefebvre, 1991). Here, Lefebvre, who acknowledgedly leveraged Situationists ideas helping him recognizing the rich and unimaginable potential of existing alternatives to relate with space via the ‘flaneur’ experiments (Harvey, 2012), points out to the always variable, unpredictable yet highly valuable nature of the relationships within social space - more specifically, to the spatial practices supporting the network formation event- as part and parcel of the enabling process of space as a productive force.

In this specific regard, following Harvey’s observations on Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital, Use values formation, and to a certain extent Complex Use values formation, couldn't be considered as a category for analysis within the study of the motion of capital - therefore, outside of the field of political economy- as far as these are dependent on the singularities necessarily attached to the sphere of private consumption, unless consumption becomes "the point of departure (production) and initiate the whole process anew:'' (Harvey, 2012 P.38). Hence, once

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social struggle and the diverse forms of its concretion, including the spatial practices supporting the network formation event, shifts towards the realm of productive consumption become not only vehicles of the definition of complex use values for the sake of urban consumption, but to the very production of those. Thus, grasping the characteristics of the spatial practices supporting the network formation event in regards to complex use value formation and, consequently, to the production of social space, should help us understanding how urban complex use values grow, how related scale economies are generated and how these use values circulate within the cycle of capital.

Now, regarding the spatial practices supporting the network formation event and subsequent complex use values formation in the context of circulation of capital, it is worth quoting Harvey for the effects of grasping what are the incentives for capital once the mentioned spatial practices and the subsequent network formation event make productive use of the digital infrastructure available in those locations currently facing the shift from industrial to digital production for such an end: ‘The coercive laws of competition also force new technologies and organizational forms to come on line all the time, since capitalists with higher productivity can out-compete those using inferior methods. Innovations define new wants and needs, and reduce the turnover time of capital and the friction of distance’ (Harvey, 2012 P.36) This adds up to our previous enunciation on the incentives offered by the digital infrastructure and digital production - to the circulation of capital, in terms not only of the positive reduction of the turnover time of capital, but to the positive reduction of ‘distanciation’, defined by Harvey as ‘a measure of the degree to which the friction of space has been overcome to accommodate social interaction’ ( Harvey, 1990 P.259). This specific aspect is expanded by Latour by claiming that technologies are to be considered as true forms of mediation, by which time, space and actants unfold in a way that facilitates not only the mastery of a specific function, but as the ‘amplification’ of some characteristics that otherwise wouldn't belong to the realm of production or, as mentioned by Latour himself ‘the mediation of technology experiments with what must be called being- as-another’ (Latour, 2002 P.248-250). By borrowing this concept of sets of time, space and action series ‘unfolding’ in the process of productive consumption, seems not far to assert that technology - digital technology for the specific case of this paper- is able of rendering the complexities of network formation through social practice, and to a certain extent, the ones derived from social struggle.

4. Prestige, spectacularization and inter-urban competition in the realm of productive consumption Commentators such as Pierre Bordieu and Jean Baudrillard have pointed to a consumption phenomena which adds up to the set of variables behind socio economic formations, endowing them with value as they make part of processes of productive consumption: symbolic capital formation (Bordieu,1977) and symbolic exchange value (Baudrillard,1981). Regarding both concepts, routines of consumption have traditionally been subject of fetishization and reification, as these embody the potential of further capital creation in the sense that the continuous appropriation of objects ordered in space develops aesthetic patterns which positively influence its productive character and, therefore, its value over time.

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In this regards, Harvey confer to these variables not only the potential of defining a characteristic ‘taste’ of a specific social formation - namely social class, but of the consolidation of territorial exchanges which can impact the ‘friction of distance’ value magnitude and, therefore, define accessibility, appropriation and command of social space itself and of its surplus value turnover (Harvey,1990). As this observation is documented, it brings to the forefront two facts: a) the role of consumption- no matter if direct or vicarious- is reinforced as a driver in the realm of productive consumption as labor flexibilization settles and, therefore, makes part of the process of circulation of capital and b) as this variation of consumption makes part of the considered variables- now vicarious consumption gets integrated, we should start considering one more dialectic relationship which unfolds once a complex use value formation takes place: the existing tension between the prestige attached to (conspicuous) consumption and the functionality it delivers or, as put by Baudrillard, the ambivalence sign exchange value /use value; that for him is at the core of capital circulation as ‘ in our societies, this ambivalence most often results on the level of each object’ (Baudrillard,1981 P. 33).

As the sign exchange value / use value tension finds its way within the complex use-value formation process - as it is representative of the needs of the mode of production and of the demands of the social formation, the magnitude-values considered in regards to this formation capital, time, actants within social struggle, their networks - should then give an account not only of the ‘totality of functions which a social formation is called on to realize’ (Santos, 1977 P.6) as these would constitute ‘ not more than a practical guarantee (or even a rationalization pure and simple)’ (Baudrillard,1981 P.29), but the degree to which each of the given functions in space are endowed with a dimension of social hierarchy, of prestige; besides an account of how these redistribute over space in regards to its functional or symbolic effects, a semiology of spatial practice.

Now, this development has a direct relation with the spectacularization of productive consumption (Harvey,1990 P.265) and to a certain extent, to the incentivization of the interurban competition.

Regarding the former, it is worth noting that in a context of demand catered with ‘differential’ consumption the access, appropriation and command of each of the complex use-values deployed in space drives the socialization of the surplus value derived from a political economy of prestige. Similarly, as in the paradox of capitalist urbanization previously described, the struggle for the monopolization of the effects of a ‘political economy of reputation’ are faced with a paradox where value magnitudes such as time and capital are confronted with the decision of hoarding or sharing the effects of reputation of a locale in order to diminish or prolong the turnover time of the circulation of capital. Notoriously, Harvey observes the consolidation of the architecture of the ‘ephemeral, of display and of transitory but participatory pleasure’ as he refers to the ‘mobilization of spectacle’ (Harvey, 1990 P.265). The ephemeral materialization of events for productive consumption, including expressions such as pop-up architecture and urbanism, cashmobs, smartmobs, complementary to the exclusive, secure shopping malls make a proxy of the appropriation of space and of its domination as an expression of this paradox, where either the reduction of time circulation is addressed by the implementation of ‘tactical’ architecture and urbanism or the effects of long-built reputation are reaped by gentrifier actants in urban space, both leading to turnover time reduction, less maintenance investment and the intensification of the use of space, ultimately.

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In regards to the inter-urban competition, should be said that the process previously described frames a ‘moment’ within the formation of a particular complex use value in a specific urban space which, most probably, takes place in several locations at the same time: ‘ Now, diachronism is at the root of spatial evolution, but the fact that the variables act synchronically- that is, in an arranged order inside a true organization--assures the continuity of space (Santos, 1977 P.6). This mentioned continuity of space leads to the formation of ‘differential’ productive capacities, which are ‘continuously eroded away in one place and recreated elsewhere’ (Swyngedouw, 1994 P.). As this development takes place, capitalism keeps on looking for marks of distinction, hence the increasing shift from urban planning into city marketing and, more specifically, into city branding efforts which reveal the ‘paradigmatic shift from output-oriented and price competition to a mode of competition that seems to be organized around image and reputation, or towards communication and acceptance [30] (Piwinger and Zerfaß, 2008 and Buß, 2008 in Knierbein et al, 2010 P. 15).

These mentioned developments suppose, from the perspective of productive consumption supported in an economy shaped by image, another -if not the most influential- incentive in the set of alternatives available for the integration of digital production infrastructure in the dynamics of complex use value formation. If so far the discussion has been centered over the capacity of digital infrastructure and trade to reduce the turnover time of capital and of digital content generation to render the width and breadth of social struggle behind the formation of complex use value to a certain extent, the degree to which actants enjoy more or less an acceptance rateby this meaning reputation building, and this acceptance degree is socialized, allows capital to look after certain complex use value formations that in quantitative and qualitative terms have the possibilities of reducing turnover time of capital while increasing the return rate.

5. Case study: Boxpark Shoreditch, a pop up shopping mall in South East London

Figure 2. Pop up mall Boxpark Shoreditch, made out of used containers and located in one of the most ambitious redevelopment plans in London ( Source: architecturaldialogue.net)

Our case study is a temporary shopping mall which has been deemed as a ‘new retail concept and the world’s first contemporary pop-up retail mall designed to provide small-scale, flexible shop units created from recycled metal shipping containers.’[31]( CMA Planning, 2011 P.11). It is

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localized in Shoreditch, a borough located in Hackney, South East London; it occupies part of a plot that was used at first as a passenger terminus and, immediately after demand of goods warehousing picked in the industrious area, turned into a goods station named as Bishopsgate Goods Depot [32](CMA Planning, 2011 P.6). After heavy use and abandonment, developments including the localization of ICT offices nearby, the opening of small, independent shops, the consolidation of households between the 20-39 years old [33], a growing mixed use vocation in the area and the recent investor-friendly redevelopment plan promoted by the borough of Hackney which includes the refurbishing of the Bishopsgate Goods Yard and the recent opening of the Shoreditch metro station on the spot, are among the notorious drivers behind the development of this temporary locale.

6. Study Method: arriving into metrics of spatial practice through qualitative and quantitative means of analysis Now, it seems proper to ask how to break down the variables and codes of production over digital content networks in order to analyze its role in the specific formation of complex use values while rendering their inner complexity, if it is the case that evidence ends pointing out to its incidence in the mentioned formation process.

As noted before, these are function of the turnover rate increase and/or turnover time reduction.

In regards to these ‘scale economies’, factors framing the particularities surrounding our case study are: a) a mode of production incentivizing the flexibilization of both labor and fixed capital; b) an efficiency oriented, investor-friendly planning policy; c) an ‘entrepreneurial’ ethic of the local administration and d) a downplayed ‘brownfield’ located in an area of burgeoning activity; clearly contribute to achieving the mentioned scale economies without the intervention of any further means of production. However, what is important to note here is that, if true all of these conditions play an important role for the consolidation of particular complex use values, it is the hypothesis of this paper that quantitative and qualitative data on the consolidation of a ‘reputation economy’ will positively impact the circulation of capital by a) helping socialize the surplus value generated via locational effects and b) by either diminishing the circulation time or increasing turnover rate.

In regards to this mentioned ‘reputation economy’, Sociologist Eugen Buß (2009) elaborates on his theory that increasing complexities pertaining to decisions of productive consumption among citizens or consumers lead to a moment of decision making where struggles related to the definition of a commodity use-value, including the organizational values of the capital and the labor behind the production of such commodities and the problem-solving capacities of that organization make a difference over their informed choices. Such a decision making process, argues Buß, is informed by processes of image/ identity building which, in turn, result in the overall reputation of the commodity, the capital, the actants and the networks behind.[34] Such an insight will inform the metrics built to test the main hypothesis of this paper: digital media is able of informing current modes of complex use value formation and, therefore, locational advantage and spatial production, ultimately.

Some metrics to take into account are:

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-The number of functions or use-values mentioned overtime by the audiences of social media outlets, leading to acknowledge either new functions or variations of such functions overtime; - The timelapse each of the use values detected are mentioned overtime; as this should represent a ‘habitus’ formation (Bordieu, 1976 in Harvey, 1990); - The tone of the content generated in regards to each of the use values detected overtime, for effects of critical mass accumulation and reputation building; - The network formation capacity of each of these use-values overtime: how use values are embedded into a complex formation overtime; These, taking the content found on each of the observations as a proxy, will deliver an indicator on the status of the complex use values formation and of the distance among the use values’ particular moment. insert here graph of network analysis and comment how relationships among actants are measured To arrive into these metrics, a total of 5841 relevant observations on the case study were collected and analyzed. These observations are made of relevant publicly available data parsed from Twitter and Facebook on October 2012 and April 2013. To arrive into the observations’ tone analysis, a stratified random walk with a 10% error margin has been applied to the pool in order to obtain a statistically sound sample. As for the network formation analysis, algorithms for statistical calculation on random clustering and communities formation were applied.

It is worth commenting that Facebook data ( n=602) has been deemed as not useful for the purposes of this research, as once these data was examined it has been found that less than 2% of it was made of opinionated content; meaning by this online users’ opinions on particular functions performed over space. The data collected has been generated on October 2012 and April 2013. The data has been organized in monthly periods in order to determine the theoretical changes or patterns in the structure of the general online representation of use values and of the complex use value formation process.

7. Results The following are the key terms associated with use values and/or social functions which made part of online conversations held by individuals during the timelapse mentioned. For the objectives of this research, a specific topic that is repeatedly mentioned online is considered as a ‘actant’, a unit with definite possibilities of merging with others which, in turn, may derive into new capacities [35] (DeLanda, 2006). That is, new use values / social functions.

In this regard, each of the keywords listed have to do with use values/social functions, which represent an actant endowed with association capacities. These were mined from the retrieved data sets, following a protocol of statistical classification and analyzed.

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Analyzed period

Oct. 2012

Apr. 2013

Keywords

Performance, Streetfest, Shopping, Exhibition, Oxjam, London, Amsterdam,art ,party, shipyards, playing, fashion, sexual, painting, video, lunch, work

HighstreetFW, acousticafternoon, Shop,Unit, Nails, sale, roof, London, castles, squattersden, boutique, party, art, acoustic, music , print, street, show, marshmallow, performing, photo, tea, hfsw, streetfest, beer, gallery.

Table 1. Keywords on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content

As these sets of words derive from the actual statements published by people on Twitter, these were orderly put preserving the context given to each of them by ‘themes’, thus making keytags’ clusters which will make easier to visualize their behavior overtime, if they mingle with each other and when. These resulted in sets of identifiable leisure activities- these belonging to a series of live music events and live art performances; besides references to shopping, some ‘branded’ events, and to the omnipresent reference to London among others.

Once the overtime graphs were analyzed, it has been found that the themes music and art performances are predominant activities in each of the periods analyzed; followed by shopping related activities. According to charts 1 and 2, these themes altogether accounted for a share of the online mentions at 69% and 41%, respectively (See charts 1 and 2). Notoriously, the live music and art performance themes may mingle or not depending on the nature of the events mentioned online. For the October 2012 period, continued mentions of streetfest, a specific event mixing live art and music performances may well explain the interaction of these themes.

As for the April 2013 period, the mentions of other events related to the music and art performance themes made such an interaction less evident (see charts 3 and 4)

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Chart 1. Online Share of Voice on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content form the October 2012 period.

Chart 2. Online Share of Voice on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content form the April 2013 period.

As the mentioned themes interact, seems that mentions of activities grouped under the shopping theme pick up (see Charts 3 and 4). If it remains yet unclear what are the politics of such an interaction, this activity points to the ‘spectacularization’ of productive consumption theorized by Harvey (Harvey, 1990), mentioned earlier in this article. This apparently remains true not only for the ephemeral, transient materialization of the art and music performances activities, but to the very core of the productive consumption activity, which per se has now turned into a temporary experience, as it happens in an environment which is temporarily materialized for such ends.

As further data analysis is carried on, it is evidenced that most of the content lacks of an opinionated tone, hence rendering the social struggle inherent to a specific complex use value formation to a lesser extent when compared to the mention of activities with informative purposes (See Charts 5 and 6). However, as content tone analysis suggests, most of the collected reactions made by online commentators on each of the activities performed over space are

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favorable to them. If yet remains to determine how and when opinionated online conversations contribute to the consolidation of a critical mass in regards to the complex use value formation process, this finding reinforces the existence of a ‘spectacularization’ of productive consumption, as those activities favored by the audience all over twitter had to do especially with art and music performances. It can be argued that those positive opinions regarding a social function performed in space (as these events presumably are) add up to the reputation of Boxpark, of the Shoreditch area and, to a certain extent, of London. (See content analyzed from newsletters)

Chart 3. Fluctuations overtime of volume of conversations on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content form the October 2012 period.

Once further analysis on the content is applied in regards to the statistical probabilities of networking that the mined content has, it has been found that each of the temporary events taking place at boxpark shoreditch that have built a reputation by themselves ( e.g. Streetfest and High Street Fashion Week, for the periods of October 2012 and April 2013, successively) visibly contribute to the process of complex use value formation behind. This assertion finds ground in the sense that those activities which a) received most of the mentions online, b) were mostly regarded with positive tone by online commentators and c) displayed stronger networking capacity in terms of number of activities related and the weight of their interactions, are related to the events mentioned earlier ( See charts 7 and 8).These events are not only driven by an organizational effort with different actors and interests, but are complex values per se with an image, a reputation, a discourse.

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Chart 4. Fluctuations overtime of volume of conversations on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content form the October 2012 period.

Chart 5. Tone analysis of conversations on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content form the October 2012 period.

Chart 6. Tone analysis of conversations on themes related to social functions, as mined from online content form the April 2013 period.

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Chart 7. Classification of activities based on their networking capacity, as mined from online content form the October 2012 period.

Chart 8: Classification of activities based on their networking capacity, as mined from online content form the April 2013 period.

8. Conclusion All in all, it can be elaborated that structural developments such as the constant demand from capital to reduce turnover time while/or maximizing it and labor flexibilization, combined with the continuous strengthening of digital infrastructure (e.g. mobile access to social networks and blogging) and the continuous spectacularization of productive consumption contribute altogether to a new scenario of city making and complex use value formations where time is the critical

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resource to manage in this emerging spatial/technology nexus: In regards to capital, as the demand is to minimize its exposure to fix investments, this has to materialize on temporary infrastructure (buildings, spatial settings, etc), thus maximizing the turnover rate. Productive time allocation is eased by mobile communication technologies, as we can work from any location we choose, while we can keep up with changes in the spatial sphere in regards to any novelties on those commoditized environments we are used to enjoy. Quality time is spent with the help of same technologies as we follow reviews, video and photos on exciting, new complex use value formations that have a ‘creative’ edge, being shared on online media.

We increasingly delegate rational choice to the wisdom of the crowd. In this specific regard, online content exchanged on blogs, social media and so on is a means by which we establish contingently obligatory material relationships with others [36] (see DeLanda, 2006 P.11-12) - just as currency. Indeed, digital content, with a degree of limitation in acknowledging the social struggle inherent to a complex use value formation, can be considered as a means to command spatial production, as online social networks are increasingly becoming not only digital containers of those activities defining the ‘optimal’ use of space, but means to quantify the image of a place via the reputation of the use values it holds.

Indeed, the tone of an online review of a use value can arguably determine the pace and the success of a complex use value formation, which will determine competitive advantage, ultimately. This theoretical development poses a challenge to the traditional roles of city planners and developers, who will have not only to start interpreting the structure of demands of productive consumption behind the logic of online content distribution in terms of temporary use regulation, taxation, availability, capacity and so on; but to start synchronizing with the contemporary demands of city branding behind contemporary processes of complex use value formation, including events organization.

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