What happens to urban culture & identity when physical and digital spaces merge?

The Mobile City is an initiative that focuses on locative and mobile media, urban culture and identity. We aim to bring professionals from different disciplines (academics, urban professionals, media designers, artists, telecom operators, etc) together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge?

Locative media and hybrid space
The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighborhoods and highway interchanges is overlaid with the ‘virtual space’ of electronic communication-, information- and observation-networks of GSM, GPS, CCTV, UMTS, WIFI, RFID, ETC. At the same time, the domain of digital space is increasingly becoming physical, an “internet of things”.

It is no longer useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical, or the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (not real or not material). The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into “hybrid space”. These developments in formerly separated domains profoundly influence the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity.

Our main questions:
Locative and mobile media can be seen as the interface between the digital domain and the city, bringing the digital world into the physical world, and at the same time uploading and sharing real world experiences back to the digital world. Thus we think it important to address these three questions:

• From a theoretical point of view, what are useful concepts to talk about the blurring/merging of physical and digital spaces?
• From a critical perspective, what does the emergence of locative and mobile media mean for urban culture, citizenship, and identities?
• From a pragmatic point of view, what does all this mean for the work of urban professionals (architects, designers, planners), media designers, and academics?

For a more in depth analysis of how we approach locative media and its importance for urban culture, please see our conference text. It can be viewed here, or downloaded as a PDF file (165 KB).

How we plan to address these questions?
In February 2008 we organized a conference in cooperation with the Netherlands Architecture Institute on the main themes of The Mobile City. In November 2009 we organized a series of events during the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. In 2010 we are participating in a cluster of events called Adaptation: Designing the Future City at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai during the World Expo.

We will maintain this weblog as a central repository for all things ‘The Mobile City’. In addition we use various social networks (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter) as a way to organize people and knowledge around these topics.We might organize another conference or other events in the future. We are open to discuss any kind of cooperation with third parties as well.

Who is behind this?
The Mobile City is an initiative by Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange.

The first Mobile City Conference in 2008 was organized in collaboration with the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the research groups New Media, Public Sphere and Urban Culture at the University of Groningen, and Playful Identities at the the Erasmus University Rotterdam & University of Utrecht.

At the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in 2009 The Mobile City organized a number of events as part of the ‘Connectivity’ theme of the IABR, in cooperation with the IABR, the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects.

In the summer of 2010 The Mobile City is one of the co-organizers of the Adaptation: Designing the Future City. Here we collaborate with Virtueel Platform, Shanghai eArts, V2_, Cybercity Ruhr and Dynamic City Foundation. Our event ‘Designing the Hybrid City’ is curated together with Virtueel Platform.

Adaptation: Designing the Future City takes place in the Dutch Cultural Centre in Shanghai. The DCC is an initiative of the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and coordinated by the Netherlands China Arts Foundation. Adaptation has been realized with the kind support of the Netherlands China Arts Foundation.

Tijmen Schep is an occasional contributor to The Mobile City weblog.

Contact

You can contact us via info [AT] themobilecity.nl. You can also reach us separately by using <first name> [AT] themobilecity.nl.