Understanding the Digital City

Copenhagen.
And this pre-lunch session here at COST298 ends with Chantal de Gournay and Frank Thomas, who approach digital cities from a different perspective. Amongst the key issues for them are how to combine real, virtual, and social spaces, how to address local and global identities,communities, and neighbourhoods, and how to understand different modes of participation in the digital city.

Chantal highlights the possibility for a fifth screen (after TV, PC, videogames, and mobile phones) as urban spaces become augmented realities through the introduction of digital screens that allow both more traditional forms of broadcasting and new forms of 'egocasting', perhaps in response to people in the vicinity. This ubiquitous paradigm creates the 'seamless city', in which real and virtual life merge and different times and spaces blend into one. Potentially, in such spaces, everywhere is nowhere, and there is no sense of the here and now.

Physical spaces configure our understanding of space and time, of status and relationship, but such understandings are dislocated by virtual spaces and their malleability; spaces can be experienced differently by each individual, and respond differently to each user. The fifth screen has the potential to blend both.

Technorati : COST298, city, fifth screen, mobile, space, time
Del.icio.us : COST298, city, fifth screen, mobile, space, time