Search results

Owning The City: New Media And Citizen Engagement In Urban Design

Over the last few years, the term “smart cities” has gained traction in academic, industry, and policy debates about the deployment of new media technologies in urban settings. It is mostly used to describe and market technologies that make city infrastructures more efficient, and personalize the experience of the city. Here, we want to propose the notion of “ownership” as a lens to take an alternative look at the role of urban new media in the city. With the notion of ownership, we seek to investigate how digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues to engage in co-creating the socialfabric and built form of the city. Taking ownership as the point of departure, we wish to broaden the debate about the role of new media technologies in urban design from an infrastructural to a social point of view, or from “city management” to “city making”.

Effectiveness of Virtual Reality in Participatory Urban Planning

In urban planning, 3D modeling and virtual reality (VR) provide new means for involving citizens in the planning process. For municipal government, it is essential to know how effective these means are, to justify investments. In this study, we present a case of using VR in a municipal process of civic participation concerning the redesign of a public park. The process included codesign activities and involved citizens in decision-making through a ballot, using 3D-rendered versions of competing designs. In codesign, 3D-modeling tools were instrumental in empowering citizens to negotiate design decisions, to discuss the quality of designs with experts, and to collectively take decisions. This paper demonstrates that, in a ballot on competing designs with 1302 citizens, VR headsets proved to be equally effective compared to other display technologies in informing citizens during decision making. The results of an additional, controlled experiment indicate that VR headsets provide higher engagement and more vivid memories than viewing the designs on non-immersive displays. By integrating research into a municipal process, we contribute evidence of cognitive and engagement effects of using 3D modeling and immersive VR technologies to empower citizens in participatory urban planning. The case described in the paper concerns a public park; a similar approach could be applied to the design of public installations including media architecture.

Disaster risk management: urban flooding and heatstress

Natural disasters are a growing concern around the globe. In the Netherlands, water has always played an important role as both friend and enemy. To quickly analyze and visualise possible disaster outcomes has been really difficult. In collaboration with engineering company Tauw we improved this modellingwith an interdisciplinary team of GIS experts, High performance computing and real time visualisation. In a pilot for the city center of Groningen we developed a 3D version of flooding landscape maps (RUG, 2014) after modelling extreme rainfall. With a flooding landscape map you can see at a glance where water isgoing and where problem areas arise in case of extreme rainfall. Any municipality or county can thus quickly determine which measures are to be taken to prevent for example disruption to traffic or flooding damage tobuildings.

Amsterdam film festival city

This chapter takes a closer look at the case of Amsterdam as a particular manifestation of a film festival city. Drawing from a new dataset on festivals in the Netherlands, the data supports the view of film festivals as a highly dynamic cultural sector: Internationally acclaimed film festivals exist beside smaller festivals that are more community bound; new festivals emerge annually, and young festivals struggle to survive the three-to-five-year mark.Amsterdam holds a unique position in the Dutch film festival landscape as a third of all film festivals in the Netherlands take place in the capital city. Our data collection helps to bring parts of the city’s film infrastructure to the forefront. On the one hand, Amsterdam’s top five locations for film festival events show clear creative cities logic: The data shows just how powerful the pull of such locations is. On the other hand, we find evidence of placemaking and livable city strategies: Amsterdam’s film festivals extend into the capillaries of the city.Dedicated festival datasets may cast new perspectives on local or national festival landscapes, by revealing patterns that remain hidden in qualitative and case-study based projects. But there are also challenges to address in data-driven research on festival cultures, we name a few such as categorization of data. We conclude that such challenges can be more easily faced if more datasets, of for instance, other cities, are pursued and become available.

The Smart City Hospitality.

Guiding the visually impaired through the environment with beacons

Urban environments are full of noise and obstacles, and therefore potentially dangerous and difficult to navigate for the visually impaired. Using Bluetooth beacons and a smartphone app we guide them through these environments by providing the information needed for that specific location. We present the preliminary results concerning the usability of our approach.