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Inclusiva-net, 2008

1. ABSTRACT The accessibility of urban space is usually considered in terms of ergonomics and mobility. However, while physical accessibility enables spatial mobility, it does not ensure universal access to the city as a complex foundation for human social and cultural activities. This article focuses on the need to understand cities as a social interface which requires the integration of technical resources for accessibility and participation; it explores what type of information technology should be included in this system; and it offers a brief ...

The Design Journal

Abstract The City project focuses on a treatment of the city that deliberately blurs the boundaries between physical and digital media. We are combining mobile computers, hypermedia and virtual environments in one system, and allowing each person to interact with others even if they are using quite different media or combinations of media. We have found it useful to consider the many media, technologies and spaces as one design medium, because each person's experience depends on them all.

Design Principles and Practices, 2016

Urban areas are increasingly playing a bigger role in our societies. “Approximately 359 million people – 72% of the total EU population – live in cities, towns and suburbs. Urban areas face multiple and interconnected challenges related to employment, migration, demography, water and soil pollution, etc. But, they are also engines of new ideas and solutions, dynamic places where changes happen on a larger scale and at a fast pace. Over 70% of the EU’s population lives in towns and cities and this growth is set to continue in the coming years. Many of the social, economic and environmental issues Europe faces have an urban dimension and are most likely to have a larger impact in cities. On the other hand, cities are where the potential for innovation lies to solve these issues.” (1). The European Union adopted the Pact of Amsterdam on the 30 May of 2016, a new European Urban Agenda (2). This document make official the strategy to improve the cooperation among cities and strengthen the "urban dimension" in EU decision making by assuming cities as priority funds target. In order to stimulate growth, liveability and innovation in the cities of Europe and to ensure the maximum utilisation of the growth potential of cities to successfully tackle social challenges, the European Commission decided to fixe new working methods with the following objectives: • To promote, develop, implement and evaluate regulations and legislation in line with local practice in cities, integrating the operative level of Member state with the local entities. • To support cities in having a better access and utilisation of European funds, shifting the focus from territories to cities. • To improve the cooperation based on sharing good practices, urban knowledge and innovation. The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development took place this year in Quito, Ecuador (https://habitat3.org/) involving thirty thousand people from 167 countries and from different sectors: mostly local government and majors, but also non- profit, business and academia. The product of this event, happening ones in 20 years, is the New Urban Agenda, an action oriented document that set global standards of achievement in sustainable development. One of the major point of this global summit has been the new positive role accorded to the urbanization and the rethinking of cities as resources centre to exploit for improving the quality of life of the world population and address future challenges. The new role of ICT in shaping the future of cities has been synthetize in: “We will promote the development of national information and communications technology policies and e government strategies as well as citizen-centric digital governance tools, tapping into technological innovations, including capacity development programmes, in order to make information and communications technologies accessible to the public, including women and girls, children and youth, persons with disabilities, older persons and persons in vulnerable situations, to enable them to develop and exercise civic responsibility, broadening participation and fostering responsible governance, as well as increasing efficiency. The use of digital platforms and tools, including geospatial information systems, will be encouraged to improve long-term integrated urban and territorial planning and design, land 3 administration and management, and access to urban and metropolitan services.” New Urban Agenda (3). It is not surprising that Computer Science is increasingly focusing on urban areas to support solutions towards the above challenges. If firstly Computer Science proposed technological solutions, as witnessed by the Smart Cities trend, nowadays citizens are becoming the centre of the debate. Marcus Foth in the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (4) affirms that “information is literally what constitutes a city” highlighting how the role of the physical city is to be a container for information-based human activities. It is not surprising that Computer Science is increasingly focusing on urban areas to support solutions towards the above challenges. If firstly Computer Science proposed technological solutions, as witnessed by the Smart Cities trend, nowadays citizens are becoming the centre of the debate. Marcus Foth in the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (4) affirms that “information is literally what constitutes a city” highlighting how the role of the physical city is to be a container for information-based human activities. Among the many challenges offered by urban areas we focus on the collaborative management by citizens of commons. A growing literature in sociology, economics, law architecture, etc. recognizes that cities are commons: urban areas are not only private or public, but they belong also to a third dimension of economics where citizens manage and take care of urban spaces and municipalities assume the role of enablers. This trend makes pair with the recognition that citizens play a role in public services and when this role is recognized and supported, it is likely that the services are improved. The Nobel prize Elinor Ostrom has been the economist who introduced in the scientific debate both issues from the ‘90s. In both cases the point is supporting the cooperation among citizens via a civic platform. The first two requirements for such a platform are self-evident: 1. It must express the geographical dimension of urban spaces. 2. It must offer social network functionalities. Already these two requirements pose a challenge, since there is no solution combining the two aspects both at a research and commercial level. Moreover, entering in the details of putting these two dimensions together raises a number of further research questions: 1. Since many social networks already exists, which are the requirements requesting for a new one of a different kind? 2. Which kind of entities should populate the urban map? which are the properties of such entities? which are their functionalities? how they are connect the one with the other? 3. Traditional cartography associates different information at different level of details. Current GIS or VGI technology don’t. How to allow users to interact with an urban map at different levels of detail? How to build automatically different scales starting from cartographic data such as OpenStreetMap? 4. Since the platform’s aim is to support cooperation, an explicit management of time is requested. Most social applications and VGI sistems don’t consider time. How to model the temporal dimension of urban entities in an effective and efficient way? 5. How organize the architecture of such a system, which merges social networking functionalities and GIS? Being a platform oriented to citizens, how to involve them in the co-design of the platform so to take advantage of a participatory approach? 4 6. Finally, given the general-purpose character of such a platform, how to test it in different settings? The methodology to answer these questions is not merely theoretical but it resulted in the development of the georeferenced FirstLife civic social network which the candidate worked on and in its testing, in an action-research fashion. In doing this, the candidate lead a team of several programmers and cooperated with the other researchers working on the co-design and testing, under the overall supervision of Prof. Guido Boella within the framework of several funded research projects (see Chapter 8). Integral part of the thesis is thus the platform itself deriving from the research answering the above research questions. FirstLife is a fully functional prototype developed using precise software engineering methodologies and tested in several scenarios with around 2,000 users.

Next Generation Society. Technological and …, 2010

2014

In a built environment that is now affected more and more by rapid and dramatic change, ecological considerations, and social and cultural impact. Human being as an actor is in the middle of the stage in between nature and time and the relationships occur in our environment is the place in which we live, in other words cities. The big cities are a good example which is showing us the overlapping of physical infrastructures and human activities in a lump. And it continues to grow unconsciously as a static way without stopping. At the same time, it has the potential of innovation for the future life. Cities comprises various spaces such as visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, natural and man-made. The spaces of interest to this research are the vacant spaces of the city; in other words, activity spaces which get more closer to people. And the first aim is to understand the production of space as a transformative process and to produce information with the possible ways of temporality by a defined function: "exhibition". This is a non-static process open to alteration and innovation, this condition is claimed to generate a "new space" open to continuous experimentation, in other words "creative spaces". Creative spaces animates public and private spaces, dynamize streets, improves local and brings all kind of people together to be inspired. So that, the topic of the research is about to improve these type of potential spaces with using and protecting them as an event based, temporary places. In order to protect them, its potential has to be seen. And temporal events can help to protect its permanence and it will be seen after that beneficial utilization. And other subject is to get the information about the vacant spaces. Because generally they are not being seen or realised, if there is nothing to see. So that it can be get lost and filled with a physical permanent structure. Art with its documentation permits a further discussion of alternatives for the space. And documentating is not just for art, it will be get useful, if the vacant spaces will being documentated. Then it will be seen in the virtual world and also in natural world. With the discussion about the research, some potentials of streets and street arts can give a new approach to the people who is living in a big city where the information can get lost easily. As all big cities have these type of problems, Istanbul has too. And in an uncontrollable way, it is growing, changing, and losing its character. But with some events, especially large-scale exhibitions in the cities such as Biennials, Triennials, Manifesto, Documenta gives some opportunities to get improve the future of the city. Istanbul Biennials from it has been started, it is improving, but the main concern is communication and getting the information fastly. And all the critics is related with this subject. With this research, it is being offered to have a system which keeps the data, and lets the data growing throuh the wide scale environment. Virtual systems can easily help in recent years by the growing information creations. And it will be helpful to the vision of the cities future with having a library, literatures of speces and with its cretivity provided by the events.

Cite as: Souliotou, A.Z. (2015) ICTs and Contemporary Art: a platform for the urban well-being, Proceedings of the 3rd International Biennial Conference Hybrid City 2015, Theona, I., and Charitos, D. (eds), University of Athens, pp. 339-344 Abstract. The objective of the present article is to show how ICTs can inspire or facilitate artistic creation and how art (inspired by ICTs or using ICTs) can contribute to the urban well-being. With the advent of the ICTs the boundaries between the makers and the users have considerably blurred in a way that the latter not only do they possess, but they also shape data. The users, thus, have become active participators and creators, so both technicians and users co-create and share information in virtual environments which can in turn influence the structure of urban physical space. This turn has led to a “Data to the people” tendency which empowers individuals and enables them to take initiatives in sharing information and in engaging with active citizenship. This new role of the user-creator has been already taken by artists who use ICTs in their artworks. All artists presented in this article have access and therefore use the ICTs within their cutting-edge art-and-technology practices which constitute a product of the information age in current post-industrial society. Whether they are telematic artists, Internet or post-Internet artists, GPS artists, GST artists or even artists making public art, their approaches show how the ICTs blaze new trails in contemporary art through a variety of projects and exhibitions using a lot of different media. As far as the telematic artists are concerned, their projects present a remarkable evolution thanks to new advances in data visualization and info-graphics which give them the opportunity to present the (flow of) telecommunications through images and maps by precisely locating and dating the communication processes. These new possibilities, thus, enable the visualization of the telecommunication networks which emerge from these processes, going beyond traditional telecommunication projects which just use telecommunication networks in installations or in collaborative projects without visualizing or mapping them. The Internet has given an unprecedented boost in communications and has notably given rise to Net Art (or Internet Art) which comprises a lot of Internet-based artistic projects presenting a high degree of heterogeneity. Especially the Web 2.0 social network platforms have led to an exponential increase of Internet Art projects. Post-Internet art has subsequently expanded the production of artworks inspired by the Internet by taking on-line data and translating them to material creations. GPS enables artists to draw by taking up physical activities like walking in cities or travelling between cities. GSTs are a considerable source of inspiration for contemporary artists, since they permit them to have a satisfactory –if not a complete– image of urban places and engage themselves with cyber-flânerie, ceaseless exploration of the urban space and interrogation about privacy and other social issues. As far as public art is concerned, ICTs can be integrated in urban public space or even translate existing public art installations from material to electronic, providing thus the participators with a new kind of experience. The material and the electronic, the physical and the virtual, intermingle forming thus hybrid urban environments and altering the urban physical context. Furthermore ICTs provide us with a clear urbi et orbi image of the world, since a lot of (collaborative) art projects which use ICTs extend not only in the urban, but also in the global scale. Thus, they give a comprehensive image of the 21st century global village which is characterized by the rapid growth of the urban phenomenon and the shift from the city to the metropolis and thereafter to the megapolis. (Perrault, 2011) Another important recent phenomenon, which relates to the ICTs use, is that although a lot of projects are a priori considered as technological or commercial, they also turn out to be artistic and we can particularly find them implanted in physical urban space. ICTs thus instigate an inquiry with regards to the (re)definition of the ‘artistic’ and render urban physical contexts platforms for the fusion of the technological, the commercial and the artistic. All the above approaches reflect different points of view with regards to ICTs and show that art (inspired by ICTs or using ICTs) can contribute to the urban well-being by: addressing current problems of the urban living, such as earthquakes, riots, social inequality; raising questions about privacy and voyeurism; proposing alternative ways for mapping or visualizing information, as well as for establishing communication and collaborations in urban, inter-urban and even global scale; bringing together people living in urban environments. In all the above ways art can give a more comprehensive image of the contemporary urban condition and (re)define the role of ICTs in society and human history by providing new insights into their potential uses.

2012

This paper presents the process behind the design of an interactive Media Cascade in the historic city of Congonhas, Minas Gerais, Brazil. It first introduces the physical and social context of the rehabilitation of the city, in which the cascade, called Ituita, was proposed. Different to the ephemeral character of most urban interactive installations, Ituita intends to become a permanent reference for the citizens, being as much as a playful interface for interaction as a place for raising and putting in evidence issues related to the city. This paper, thus, presents the three different levels of interaction—reactive, pro-active and dialogical—proposed in the interface designed for Ituita. Then, it discusses the possible urban benefit of such a proposal and concludes with assessments of both technological and social slant.