The adaptive city: A socio-technical interaction-driven approach towards urban systems

Abstract

This paper aims at establishing an associative relation between pervasive digital technologies, the physicality of the urban fabric and its inhabitants. It introduces a methodological framework for the development of an interactive urban system, installed within urban open public spaces, in the form of a hybrid interface that can serve as an interactive platform for both citizens and local planning authorities. This particular system apart from harnessing and visualizing real-time diverse quantifiable data, derived from everyday urban activities, aims to further provide the inhabitants with an agency via a continuous feedback loop processes to, ultimately, influence the physical and behavioural patterns of the city. In other words, the platform does not only imply interaction at an information exchange level, but rather aims to provoke a complex variety of inter-relations between the social and the technological via real-time spatial adaptation and spatial customization possibilities. The proposal focuses towards a system that is perceived as an integral part of the urban environment and less on the development of a specialized application or website platform that only overlays an additional virtual layer to the already existing ones in contemporary cities. Lastly, the paper deploys a set of critical issues that need to be taken into account regarding the evaluation of such systems in practice.UrbanismArchitectur