Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Cybertechnologies are changing the world, both in terms of sociability and subjectivity, and consequently how people experience the city, appreciate urban landscape and nature, along with the way people interrelate to each other and with the space. The penetration of ICT into urban landscapes has increased the open space typology, adding a concept of ‘cyberpark’ to it – the public open space where nature, society, and cybertechnologies blend together to generate hybrid experiences and enhance quality of urban life. A cyberpark evolves through different ways of the implementation and use of digital technologies into a new type of a connectable, real-time responsive, sharing and integrating public place, in which, the physical dimension of a space becomes a more dynamic and blurred form of interaction This calls for understanding such hybrid spaces as more than a simple new spatial unit of urban tissue. This chapter proposes a conceptual framework for a better understanding of interweaving between physical and virtual spheres in public open spaces and addresses the results of the COST Action CyberParks. It explores, in terms of policy-making, urban planning and design, the numerous challenges and opportunities created by digital and mobile technologies. The efforts of this work are thus centred on the potential of ICT to increased possibilities for new uses and elements or even types of urban open spaces, as an important added value to the quality of life, inclusiveness, responsiveness and attractiveness of the city. In critically addressing opportunities, the chapter shall seek to question and challenge, the more ‘traditional’ understanding of what makes a good public place. In doing so, it shall attempt to provide pointers towards a re-conceptualised view of urban space design/production and (planning) control/guidance.

This chapter develops an interest in clarifying the meaning of cyberparks through an interrogation beyond its material preconditions. A cyberpark, as generated by a hybrid emergent form of co-mediated space, is a disjunctive combination: it presupposes an encounter between open public urban places and the use of ICT tools. Outstretched beyond its physical manifestation as a place of encounter, a «heterotopic» reading might reveal that the subject is displaced in many different ways, from the analogue to the digital landscape, and from the specificity of the local to the universal of the global web. It is in such transferences that several worlds blend, both in its symbolic function and social significance. Impacts of such «Other Spaces» on the nature of human being’s behaviours can be critically reflected by the consideration of the social role of ICTs as tools of alienation through reinforced governances. Hence the question of creating «non-places» arouses, affording both a consensual appropriation process and the representative commodity networks, that henceforth includes natural, technical and human aspects and at the same time constitutes hybrid identities at the interfaces of its users, subjects, objects and places.

In the near past, sources of information about public open spaces were: people, the place itself and historical archives. Accordingly, the information could be obtained by interviewing the visitors, by reading some poorly equipped signs on monuments or by research in libraries. Today, a new source appeared: The place itself covers its own information by the mean of the growing of the ICT (Information Communication Technologies). In addition, the information can be personalised in a way each people can access it individually. Ten years ago, a left-over newspaper on a park bench was a compact piece of information. Today, the newspaper resides on a smartphone in our pockets. In the future, the park bench will still be there, but dramatically changed to an IoT (Internet of things) object, bringing information to the people. Therefore, there is the need to re-think the park bench as an interface. A simple, fundamental point is: the quality of the interface rules the quality of the information. With a special focus on the latter, this chapter discusses how the classical model of the city is enhanced with the senseable city concept and how digital information influences, adopts, transforms and re-configures different objects in urban areas.

Open public spaces have always been key elements of the city. Now they are also crucial for mixed reality. It is the main carrier of urban life, place for socialization, where users rest, have fun and talk. Moreover, “Seeing others and being seen” is a condition of socialization. Intensity of life in public spaces provides qualities like safety, comfort and attractiveness. Furthermore, open public spaces represent a spatial framework for meetings and multileveled interactions, and should include virtual flows, stimulating merging of physical and digital reality. Aim of the chapter is to present a critical analysis of public open spaces, aspects of their social role and liveability. It will also suggest how new technologies, in a mixed reality world, may enhance design approaches and upgrade the relationship between a user and his surroundings. New technologies are necessary for obtaining physical/digital spaces, becoming playable and liveable which will encourage walking, cycling, standing and interacting. Hence, they will attract more citizens and visitors, assure a healthy environment, quality of life and sociability. Public space, acting as an open book of the history of the city and of its future, should play a new role, being a place of reference for the flaneur/cyborg citizen personal and social life. The key result is a framework for understanding the particular importance of cyberparks in contemporary urban life in order to better adapt technologies in the modern urban life needs.

The chapter aims to provide a contextualisation of the concept as this is perceived by a wide range of experts in public space and information technologies. To do so it makes use of a questionnaire survey conducted with the participants of the CyberParks COST Action, which collected their views on a number of aspects concerning both the mediated and the not mediated public open spaces, such as: their elements and qualities, the facilities they should offer, the activities they should facilitate, the type of space and location that are most suitable to accommodate them, their appropriate size and manner for their development, their target user group and other aspects of their configuration. The analysis brings out the commonalities and differences in experts’ views regarding the mediated and the not mediated public open spaces, and, as such, it contributes to specify further the concept, mapping out its characteristics and dimensions. This should enrich the ongoing dialogue within the literature and facilitate interactions between relevant, yet fragmented, scientific disciplines in the area to inform the production and appropriation of both mediated and the not mediated public open spaces.

We are now firmly in a digital era and technologies are ever-present. Since the introduction of new digital technologies and ICTs, such as smart phones, the literature has presented some contrasting analyses of the socio-spatial practices and impacts that have resulted from the uptake of new technologies in urban public spaces. On one hand, there is a particular set of debates that have expressed concerns that the introduction of digital technologies, especially personal ICTs, is leading to a greater withdrawal from urban public spaces.

CyberParks aims at advancing knowledge on the relationship between information and communication technologies and the socially sustainable production and usage of public open spaces. Such research necessitates a solid methodological base. Urban ethnography brings together a number of perspectives and approaches to deal with cultural and social aspects of urban life, and as such it is able to provide an integrated methodological framework for the study of technology-public space relationship. The ethnographic approach means, by definition, an in-depth, micro-scale look at the phenomena under concern. However, the technological dimension makes the relationship between people and space more complex. This is not simply because an additional layer of analysis is added; it comes as a result of the emergence of multiple connections between the real and the virtual. From an ethnographic perspective, this requires the researcher to capture, explore and understand the cyber-social phenomena and dynamics in a multifaceted, hybrid, triangulated and cross-referenced way. This makes ethnographic research much more complicated but more interesting as well. The current chapter attempts to outline such an analytical framework to guide empirical research on the issues. This framework draws on the public space literature and adds the technological dimension brought in by the CyberParks project. We argue that this enriches the ethnographic approach providing a more integrated framework for the analysis of the relationship between people, space and technology.

The new mobile information and communications technologies expand human connectivity to reconfigure public spatialities and to give rise to novel needs for, and practices of, public space usage. The research in this chapter focuses on university students to explore how they perceive and use the public space of university campuses and how they use personal information and communications technologies in it. This allows for an identification of emerging patterns and practices of university public space usage, along with preferable characteristics, designs and ways of management. Data are collected from three case studies, the University College Cork in Cork (Ireland), the University of Thessaly in Volos (Greece), and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Warsaw (Poland), enabling us to spot similarities and differences in the above trends, that would be attributed to culture and local conditions and lifestyles.

The new information and communications technologies are expanding human connectivity, reconfiguring urban spatialities and generating a kind of social space that spans real and virtual, personal and impersonal, private and public. As a result, the space and time boundaries become blurred, giving rise to novel needs for, and practices of, public space usage. However, the ways in which these new practices affect public space engagement and public life in general, remain yet unclear. In addition, variations might exist due to differences in local culture and conditions, or due to specific lifestyles and behaviours favouring isolation and privatism or, at best, interaction only with close friends and kin. The above issues become even more critical for young people, who born in a digital era are able to handle new technologies with utmost ease. This chapter sheds light on the related perceptions and practices of adolescents. Structured interviews were applied to eight teenagers living in Hannover (Germany), Lisbon (Portugal), Tel Aviv (Israel) and Volos (Greece) to gather focused, qualitative and textual data. It examines how young people of distinct sociocultural contexts perceive and use both public spaces and digital technologies. This enables to identify emergent logics, needs and patterns of socialization and public space engagement placing specific emphasis on the role information technologies can play in them.

User-generated content (UGC) provides useful resources for academics, technicians and policymakers to obtain and analyse results in order to improve lives of individuals in urban settings. User-generated content comes from people who voluntarily contribute data, information, or media that then appears in a way which can be viewed by others; usually on the Web. However, to date little is known about how complex methodologies for getting results are subject to methodology-formation errors, personal data protection, and reliability of outcomes. Different researches have been approaching to inquire big data methods for a better understanding of social groups for planners and economic needs. In this chapter, through UGC from Tweets of users located in Barcelona, we present different research experiments. Data collection is based on the use of REST API; while analysis and representation of UGC follow different ways of processing and providing a plurality of information. The first objective is to study the results at a different geographical scale, Barcelona’s Metropolitan Area and at two Public Open Spaces (POS) in Barcelona, Enric Granados Street and the area around the Fòrum de les Cultures; during similar days in two periods of time - in January of 2015 and 2017. The second objective is intended to better understand how different types of POS’ Twitter-users draw urban patterns. The Origin-Destination patterns generated illustrate new social behaviours, addressed to multifunctional uses. This chapter aims to be influential in the use of UGC analysis for planning purposes and to increase quality of life.