Joined webinar with IaaC and CLAC about Gamification and Public Space Co-creation.
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This chapter explores the use of “responsive” or “interactive” urban media technologies as a tool or “building block” in the (re)design of urban public spaces. This is especially relevant as in the last two decades, urban development and digital technologies have brought out new types of urban typologies and practices often referred to as “networked urbanism.” These typologies and practices bring out specific challenges with regard to their functioning as public space. We argue that responsive technologies could reinforce qualities of public space in this condition of “networked urbanism”; however, their implementation demands new strategies and above all new forms of cooperation between disciplines such as architecture, urban design, and urban interaction design. To aid such an approach, this chapter introduces a heuristic of five mechanisms of responsive media. These are meant to function as a shared vocabulary aiding designers of various backgrounds to collaborate in an interdisciplinary design process for public spaces in a broader development of networked urbanism.
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Responsive public spaces use interactive technologies to adapt to users and situations. This enhances the quality of the space as a public realm. However, the application of responsive technologies in spatial design is still to be explored. What exactly are the options for incorporating responsive technologies in spatial designs to improve the quality of public spaces? The book Responsive Public Spaces explores and disentangles this new assignment for designers, and presents inspiring examples. A consortium of spatial designers, interaction designers and local stakeholders, headed by the Chair of Spatial Urban Transformation of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, carried out a two-year practice-based study of responsive public spaces. This book draws on those insights to provide a practical approach and a roadmap for the new design process for responsive public spaces.The study results are of signi¬icance for various professional fields. The book is intended for clients and stakeholders involved in planning and design of public spaces, spatial designers, interaction designers and students.
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PurposeThis paper aims to consider the relationship between urban events and urban public space, asking whether cities have enough space for events and whether events have enough space in cities.Design/methodology/approachPolicy analysis surrounding events and festivals in the Netherlands is used to understand the dynamics of urban events, supported by content analysis of policy documents. A vignette of event space struggles in Amsterdam illustrates the contradictions of the event/space relationship.FindingsThe research identifies a policy shift in the Netherlands towards urban events from expansive, festivalisation strategies to defensive, NIMBYist policies. It exposes contradictions between protecting space as a living resource and the exploitation of space for regenerative purposes. Three future scenarios for urban events are outlined: conflict and competition, growth and harmony and digitalisation and virtualisation.Practical implicationsDevelops scenarios for the future relationship between events and urban space.Originality/valueProvides an analysis of the recursive spatial implications of the growth of the events sector for cities and the growth of cities for events.
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The Covid-19 pandemic triggered governments and designers to revalue and redesign public spaces. This paper focuses on the various design responses to Covid-19 proposed and implemented in public spaces. In particular, we identify the kinds of challenges that such design responses address and the strategies that they use. We selected 56 design examples, largely collected from internet sources. By analyzing the design examples we identified five Covid-related challenges that were addressed in public space: sustaining amenities, keeping a distance, feeling connected, staying mentally healthy, and expanding health infrastructures. For each challenge, we articulated 2 to 6 design strategies. The challenges highlight the potential of public space to contribute to more resilient cities during times of pandemic, also in the future. The design strategies show the possible ways in which this potential can be fulfilled. In our next steps, we will use our findings to develop a program of possibilities; this program will contain a wide range of design strategies for responding to future pandemics and will be made publically accessible in an online database. The program contributes to more resilient post-Covid cities, by offering a variety of possibilities for coping with, and adapting to, pandemic-related shocks and stressors.
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Can audience embarrassment be used to shape interactions in public settings? Is this the threshold for an audience to step in and / or out of the interaction in performative interactions in public space? The proliferation of mobile and ubiquitous devices has shifted the attention to the design of interactive systems for use in public settings. This design applies the notion of performance to attract and engage audiences. Because performance becomes such a core part of the interaction, the success of those interactive systems heavily depends upon the physical, social and emotional context in which they are to be used. Indeed, strangers around a potential user may hinder or encourage that individual's participation in the interaction. Similarly, the physical space in which the interaction takes place, public or semipublic space may as well facilitate audience participation or prevent it. This paper investigates what characteristics of this setting (perceived / felt) can trigger audience participation in the interaction. A model based on the notion of performance and entailing some degree of felt embarrassment is applied to two cases to explain how the potential embarrassment implicit in any interaction in public space can be used to encourage users’ participation in it.
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It’s no secret that cities are booming. They continue to attract the world’s top talent, stimulate the economy, act as hubs of innovation, and remain the cultural melting pots of all nations. Yet, we must ask the question, do the inhabitants of our ever-popular cities really feel at home in them? Furthermore, are the public places within a city really even ours?
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Public Play Space (PPS) is a project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and developed by IAAC, BUas, and CLAC. It promotes innovative and creative practices for the co-design of inclusive, cohesive, and sustainable public spaces, through the use of games and digital technologies, in a transnational and European perspective, fostering the process of placemaking.The objective of this PPS Wiki Community Platform is to create a knowledge community on the use of digital technologies and games to enhance participatory processes for urban design and placemaking, allowing a wider dissemination of the best practices in this field and to facilitate knowledge sharing and the interaction among key stakeholders.
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The right to the city is a concept that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre’s book ‘Le Droit à la Ville’ in 1968 and that has been reclaimed more recently by social movements, thinkers and several progressive local authorities alike as a call to action to reclaim the city as a co-created space—a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism have had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries. Today, the right to the city theory has inspired many social movements in the world, especially in the Middle East (e.g. Arab Spring movements and conquering the public squares of the cities by citizens, the Istanbul movement in Taksim square, the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York). Urban public space is the place where all the collective social movements and collective memory of citizens occur. However, the main question around the neoliberal city of today is how and who will create the public space and for whom will this space be created? The aim of this chapter is to discuss the triple notions of space production, collective use of space and the right to the city in the context of the neoliberal cities of the Middle East. We will use a desktop review and case study approach to explain how, in the neoliberal city of today, the occupation of collective space in favour of private profit upsets and impinges upon the general right to the city. All the while discussing the participation of citizens in the process of space production and the increase in the collective use of public space, hence extending and enlarging the citizenry’s right to the city.
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