I am happy to share I have joined the Advisory Board of UrbanIxD, a EU funded project “that will build a research network around the domain of data-rich urban environments,focusing on human activities, experiences and behaviours”.
This means an amazing chance to contribute to its objectives and to interact with a great lineup of professionals with much more experience and background than me on these topics. The most promising feature of the project, and this is why probably my contribution makes sense and why I understood the potential of this project from the very first days I got to know it, is that there is a strong focus on reflection about the role of technology in everyday life and human interaction. This research framework makes sense when there is a growing split between different approaches to smart cities and related technologies and the lack of cross-sectoral dialogue in the different knowledge fields of urban technologies. This is due to different scale and perspective approaches to understand cities or a dialogue of the deaf in which human interaction, behaviour and needs re usually cornered in the mainstream celebratory discourses that have become a standard. In this sense, the project is an opportunity to look into hybrid cities from a bottom-up pespective and community intelligence.
“We wrote in late 2011 about some early research suggesting that many Twitter users in fact follow other people located within their same city, evidence, Richard Florida wrote, that the Internet is reinforcing the value of place instead of eliminating it.
But now that Twitter is a few years older – and considerably more global – Leetaru and several colleagues have conducted a massive new analysis of the site that suggests the opposite: ‘In effect,’ Leetrau says, ‘location plays a much lesser role now in terms of who we talk to, what we talk about, and where we get our information.’”
Ha sido un encuentro bien interesante centrado en cómo sacar partido al máximo de la ciudad que ya tenemos. Ante el fin del modelo expansivo, toca volver la mirada de una vez a los espacios, edificios y equipamientos que en la ciudad consolidada están esperando una activación posible. El centro de Valencia, la ciudad entera, es una buena muestra y, de hecho, los organizadores prepararon unos mapas a la entrada de la sede a modo de exposición representando los espacios sin uso en la ciudad. Muchos, demasiados. Pero, también, muchas posibilidades de desarrollar actividades en ellos. Pero como transmitieron muchos de los proyectos que formaron parte del seminario, sólo podrán ser realidad desde nuevas prácticas urbanas y nuevas formas de crear cercanía y relación entre la ciudadanía más próxima a estos espacios.
