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Departing from the traditional understanding of the social implications of urban design and the underlying notion of ‘place’, the chapter first questions its current relevance vis-à-vis the mediated city. It examines whether ICT has given rise to the establishment of new notions of space and place, identifying new design challenges for cities and rethought approaches to the production of space. In view of the latter, the chapter subsequently questions the manner with which digital media may facilitate inclusive design of public spaces. In order to address this objective, the chapter illustrates some interesting empirical data emanating from literature and research projects based in the UK, Poland and Malta. The case studies in the literature illustrate how ICTs are being used as tools within participatory processes for the inclusive design of urban public and recreational spaces and in order to gauge citizen/user expectations towards urban space. The chapter finally attempts to redefine public participation through ICT and to frame the above discussion within the potentially newly redefined role of urban designers involved in such processes. The underlying question to be addressed in this chapter, therefore, has to deal with the manner with which urban professionals may effectively achieve inclusive participatory design, particularly in light of new phenomena brought about by the mediated city and with the potential of this newly obtained and enriched data.

Part 3 Programming and Activating Cyberparks deals with the variety of ways in which urban public spaces can be reinvigorated through the use of digital media technologies. As is outlined in the introduction to this volume, digital media technologies profoundly shape the use and perception of urban public spaces. Critical observers have noted that digital media may threaten the public nature of our cities and civic spaces. For instance, elsewhere we have described these threats in terms of three Cs: commercialisation, control, and capsularisation (de Lange and de Waal ). First, the combination of digital media technologies and consumer culture overlays everyday urban life with a market logic of pervasive customer tracing, quantification, and a vying for attention. Datafication and personalized recommendation services capitalise on our habitual everyday movements in the city, turning them into an ever-expanding string of (potential) customer ‘touchpoints’. This affects the spatial, social and cultural dimensions of almost every realm of urban life, from work to meeting to leisure to travel to home. Visible illustrations include the rapidly changing appearance of high streets in most cities, or the nature and quality of inner-city neighbourhoods coinciding with the popularity of platforms like Airbnb (for more on platforms, see van Dijck et al. ). As a result, our polyvocal and frictional public open spaces are being transformed into silent and seamless marketplaces, where public interactions are reduced to commercial transactions.

This contribution explores concepts, approaches and technologies used to make urban public spaces more playful and artful. Through a variety of compelling narratives involving play and art it assists in the design of new cyberparks, public spaces where digitally mediated interactions are an inherent part. How can play and interactive art be used to strengthen urban public spaces by fostering citizen engagement and participation? We propose to not only utilise interactive media for designing urban (public) spaces, but also for social innovation for the benefit of citizens. in cyberparks. The contribution connects urbanity, play and games, as well as concepts of active and passive interactive digital art as part of trends towards pervasive urban interaction, gameful design and artification. We position this as an important part of developing human-centred smart cities where social capital is central, and where citizens engaging in play and art are prerequisites for sustainable communities. Using art, play and games to foster citizen engagement and collaboration is a means to develop social technologies and support the development of collective intelligence in cyberparks. This is studied in concrete cases, such as the Ice Castle in Luleå, Sweden and the Ars Electronica in Linz, from a multi-disciplinary stance involving interaction design, digital art, landscape design, architecture, and health proficiencies. We will analyse two cases of gameful design and one case of digital interactive art being used to address urban issues. Rezone the game is an interactive multimedia game developed to tackle vacancy in the city of Den Bosch in the Netherlands. The Neighbourhood is a board game developed to involve various stakeholders in making their neighbourhood using water as a collective resource.

The chapter defines public open space as a commons and explores innovative ways for its management and sustainable development through the use of new information and communication technologies. It argues that hybrid conglomerates of space and technological interfaces provide this possibility. Section  defines common pool resources and discusses issues of its management, before it moves to identify public open space as a commons and to outline key directives for governance. Section  outlines the new ICT and considers practices and technologies that can be used in order to enhance community identity, social interaction and user engagement in the governance of the public open space as a commons. Finally, the last section concludes this chapter with some remarks on the conditions under which the hybrid of a public open space with ICT features could be approached as yet another kind of ‘soft’ type of common pool resource.

In recent years, mobile devices have become very popular communication tools that provide access to information and communication, influence people’s social behaviour and change patterns of their everyday activities. The use of communication technologies in public open spaces has become significant for the outdoor experiences of people and the relationship between users and technologically mediated outdoor activities. More specifically, wireless digital cultures not only influence spatial layout, infrastructure systems and moving patterns, but also require ICT-based placemaking strategies. This is often not considered sufficiently during the physical design stage. It is important to consider a space appropriation approach to the use of digital technologies in public spaces, based on user requirements and the local context. This is demonstrated with a case study of the Gardens at new waterfront of Thessaloniki, Greece. In this project space analysis and users’ questionnaires were applied to relate digital space to the reality of the physical landscape as a first stage in the design process. This approach has wider implications for successful place making strategies. This chapter considers the possibilities of extensive outdoor use of digital media technologies in traditional forms of spatial experiences. It proposes that the new digital layer overlaying the physical space should first be methodologically explored in a way that could advance understanding of the extent to which immaterial networks and relationships can affect material planning and design dimensions.

The centre point of this chapter is how to increase the resilience of the urban environment by integrating the cyberpark in its spatial planning and policies. Disaster prevention and preparedness are a priority in resilience, and two major related sectors are infrastructure and information. Significant components of prevention infrastructure in cities are public/free spaces. Public spaces are used as refuge in cases of natural disasters (earthquakes, fires etc.), but also as spaces of physical contact, communication, community bonding, and provision of social services in cases of social crises (the cases of refugees). Information, as the other major sector of prevention, may vary from dissemination of information in an individual basis, to information exchange in a collective basis, the latter being of significant value in cases of prevention. The collective basis of information exchange is further expanded and technologically improved through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). This chapter focuses on the psychological and social roles of ‘the cyberpark’ in extraordinary events and illustrate the importance of its physical form and spatiality. Cyberparks combines and explores the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and urban open/public spaces. In this sense, they combine elements of both, prevention infrastructure and information, and they constitute significant components of urban resilience.

This chapter focuses on co-creation as the way to engage different stakeholders with everyday urban environments based on equality, diversity and social cohesion. It presents the relationship of co-creation and inclusiveness of public open spaces together with different aspects of co-creation related to issues of publicness and space. It discusses why and how co-creation must take into consideration the characteristics of the comprehensive spatial development processes. It suggests that co-creation is a wider concept than co-design and is a multistage process that contributes to inclusive public spaces, providing measures for social sustainability of place. This chapter argues that digital tools may help to overcome challenges of co-creation and provide an opinion on the contribution of digital technologies to the co-creation process by engaging people in the design, use and management of public spaces, providing new resources for interaction and users’ empowerment. For that it presents an overview of the possible contribution of digital technologies to support inclusiveness of the co-creation processes that is structured by typologies of digital tools and their possible interlinking with the steps of the co-creation process. To improve the understanding of such possibilities it critically addresses strengths and weaknesses of using digital tools for co-creation and inclusiveness and provides recommendations for their further development.

This chapter offers theoretical considerations and reflections on technological solutions that contribute to digitally supported documentation, access and reuse of localised heritage content in public spaces. It addresses immaterial cultural heritage, including informal stories that could emerge and be communicated by drawing hyperlinks between digitised assets, such as songs, images, drawings, texts and more, and not yet documented metadata, as well as augmenting interaction opportunities with interactive elements that relate to multiple media stored in databases and archives across Europe. The aim is to enable cultural heritage to be experienced in novel ways, supported by the proliferation of smartphones and ubiquitous Internet access together with new technical means for user profiling, personalisation, localisation, context-awareness and gamification. The chapter considers cyberparks as digitally enhanced public spaces for accessing and analyzing European cultural heritage and for enriching the interpretation of the past, along with theoretical ramifications and technological limitations. It identifies the capacities of a proposed digital environment together with design guidelines for interaction with cultural heritage assets in public spaces. The chapter concludes with describing a taxonomy of digital content that can be used in order to enhance association and occupation conditions of public spaces, and with discussing technological challenges associated with enriching public spaces with localized cultural heritage material.

If last century’s conception of open public space was understood as a performance stage where individuals could negotiate and establish relationships not only amongst them but also with elements of spatial manifestation demonstrating the significance of some visual, most times, qualities, a contemporary observer will probably not make this link.

Social behaviour in public spaces has changed over the time and has become attractive to all those involved in designing people’s spaces. Communities in different countries in Europe have shown more and more interest and various activities have started to shape the public spaces all round the world. The main objective of the chapter is to review development of the methodologies that have been used to analyse public spaces worldwide and to summarize their requirements and conditions to suggest how they can be applied in order to analyse the relationship between people and spaces, with the aim to boost the active participation of people in design process. The chapter describes the methodologies using ICTs, especially e-participation, mobile technologies, GIS systems, or on the methodologies increasing the attractiveness of the public open spaces for citizens and visitors (laser holograms, QR codes, interactive boards, online and interactive maps, questionnaires and social interaction, etc.). Information technology offers new potentials of citizen participation and provides a communication platform, which suppresses a barrier of non-professionalism, allowing for distant contacts and enabling participatory process management. Users, accustomed to communicating through ICT also in public spaces, feel by using this tool more anonymous and less harassed to express their opinion. Not only ICT are important in the 21st century society, but also new ways of social media, which are accessible/open to use for larger group of people. The institutions or municipalities could use them as semi-official information platform, public open discuss forums or resource of the public initiatives.