Barcelona
November 13th and 14th, 2017.
Active Public Space (RSC)
Responsive Cities Symposium
Today’s advances create a scenario where technology has started to be embedded in our everyday life in such ways that it is becoming part of our bodies and surrounding environment, hence overcoming the desktop era.
Over the last decades, a new generation of cities and urban planning paradigms have emerged. Technology has risen as a driving force defining new urban developments and government decisions. Cities have started to implement technology at different scales, providing more accurate models describing its functions, organization, and relationships among their parts.In our digitally connected and overpopulated cities, Public Spaces are being redefined in their consistency.
Issues such as security, accessibility, segregation, privatization, contamination, or equality to name a few, affect the essential function of public spaces as community revitalizers and challenge people to find alternative physical or digital spaces with similar effects.
Technology is emerging as a powerful generator of new digital public spheres, producing a strong impact on the physical shape of the city itself that faces designers and urbanists with new challenges. Which are the new functions and configurations that emerge in the Public Space? How do citizens interact with the urban elements and how do those latter perform? The public space is the catalyst for urban renewal in the core of cities. It is the place where participatory local democracy occurs, where the character of a Society is materialized, and where all infrastructure networks that connect the City’s functional nodes come together.
If the public space we inhabit today follows principles/protocols of the Industrial Revolution, the Information society is boosting the emergence of new protocols for the design and performance of the various elements of Public Space. New modes of interaction among social, environmental, and economic agents can be fostered through the redefinition of Public Space. How do we design and inhabit it? How does it perform? What does it produce?
The Responsive Cities 2017 Call focuses on the applications and implications of new technologies in the dynamic sphere of public spaces. The specific focus is placed on the advancements of technologies of information, interaction, and fabrication in the redefinition of public space, as catalysts for achieving urban resilience and high quality of life.