Abstract
This concluding chapter synthesizes the main themes of the book in a summary of the implications of digital technologies for the future of public space. Digital technologies are a central factor in the constitution of the current stage of evolution of public space. They bring affordances that support the social co-creation of a physical public realm, occupying a negotiated middle ground on the spectrum of the potential and actual uses of technologies in mediating between people, and between people and the world. These technologies are, at present, prominent tools brought to bear on the constant project of public space.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The accommodation of digital technologies into public space is having an effect similar to that of the intrusion into public space of the automobile a century earlier: another technology that abstracted individuals into private “bubbles” and had a jarring and reconfiguring effect on public spatial practice.
- 2.
Medicine is another area of concerted development of digital technologies that is a root of publicness in that it is grounded in the inescapability of the body and its embeddedness within networks. Networks of contagion, disease and epidemics are countered with networks of information sharing and management, and the tactical engagement of pathology with technology. War and medicine have in common the inextricability of geography as a datum of relations and the material world as a finite resource and contiguous territory.
- 3.
Of course, up to the carrying capacity of a particular space, in terms of the number of people that its resources, amenities and space can accommodate, an increase in the number of participants could be said to add to the value and sustainability of the space, rather than depleting it.
- 4.
What has received less attention in their work of two decades ago is bottom-up mechanisms of public spatial practice using technologies, as well as the experience of non-Western and non-developed urban contexts.
References
Ampatzidou C, Bouw M, van de Klundert F, de Lange M, de Waal M (2015) The hackable city: a research manifesto and design toolkit. Creative Industries Publishing, Amsterdam
Arendt H (1998) [1958]. The human condition (2nd edn). University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Bauman Z (2000) Liquid modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge
Bourdieu P (1994) Structures, habitus, power: basis for a theory for symbolic power. In: Dirks NB, Eley G, Ortner SB (eds) Culture/power/history: a reader in contemporary social theory. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Coyne R (2010) The tuning of place: social spaces and pervasive digital media. MIT Press, Cambridge
Crang M (2000) Urban morphology and the shaping of the transmissible city. City 4(3):303–315
Deutsche R (2012) The question of “public space”. Unpublished paper
Dewey F (2004) Cyburbanism as a way of life. In: Graham S (ed) The cybercities reader. Routledge, New York
Easterling K (2015) Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. Verso, New York
Ejsing-Duun S (2016) Participatory urbanism: making the stranger familiar and the familiar strange. In: Baker M, Blaagaard BB (eds) Citizen media and public spaces (critical perspectives on citizen media). Routledge, Abingdon
Fraser N (1990) Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text 25(26):56–80
Fry T (2017) Remaking cities: an introduction to urban metrofitting. Bloomsbury Academic, London
Glazkov K, Shmeleva E (2015) The formats of struggle for the city in new media (cases of the ‘local blogs’ project and mobile application ‘ingress the game’). In: Willis KS, Phillips M, Aurigi A (eds) Reflecting on social smart cities. Plymouth University, Plymouth, pp 208–222
Graham S (ed) (2004) The cybercities reader. Routledge, London
Graham S, Marvin S (1996) Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge, New York
Greene M (1982) Public education and public space. Educ Res 11(6):4–9
Habermas J (1989 [1962]) The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Polity, Cambridge
Haraway D (1991 [1985]) Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. Free Association Books, London
Hardt M, Negri A (2004) Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. Penguin, New York
Stengers I (2005) The cosmopolitical proposal. In: Latour B, Weibel P (eds) Making things public: atmospheres of democracy. ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe
Kotkin J (2000) The new geography. Random House, New York
LaMothe KL (2015) Why we dance: a philosophy of bodily becoming. Columbia University Press, New York
Latour B (2007 [2005]) Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (Clarendon lectures in management studies). Oxford University Press, Oxford
Le Crosnier HL, Vidal P (2010) Digital equipment and urban commons. Call for papers for Netcom journal Hervé. https://journals.openedition.org/netcom/1612?lang=en. Accessed 14 May 2019
Le Dantec CA (2016) Designing publics. MIT Press, Cambridge
Martin R (2016) The urban apparatus: mediapolitics and the city. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
McCullough M (2013) Ambient commons: attention in the age of embodied information. MIT Press, Cambridge
McLuhan M, McLuhan E (1988) The laws of media: the new science. University of Toronto Press, Toronto
Mela A (2014) Urban public space between fragmentation control and conflict. City Territory Architect 1:15
Nelson A (1995) The planning of exurban America: lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. J Architect Plan Res 12(4):337–356
Ratti C, Claudel M (2016) The city of tomorrow: sensors, networks, hackers, and the future of urban life. Yale University Press, New Haven
Simmel G (1975 [1903]) The metropolis and mental life. In: Wolff KH (ed) The sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York
Star SL, Ruhleder K (1996) Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. Inf Syst Res 7(1):111–134
Thompson JB (1995) The media and modernity: a social theory of the media. Polity, Cambridge
Thuma A (2011) Hannah Arendt, agency and public space. In: Behrensen M, Lee L, Tekelioglu AS (eds) Modernities revisited. IWM junior visiting fellows’ conferences vol 29, Vienna
Varnelis K, Friedberg A (2008) Place: the networking of public space. In: Varnelis K (ed) Networked publics. Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Venturi R (1966) Complexity and contradiction in architecture. Museum of Modern Art, New York
Wachter S (2012) The digital city: challenges for the future (trans: Waine O), Metropolitics. http://www.metropolitiques.eu/The-digital-city-challengesfor.html. Accessed 21 Oct 2017
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jachna, T. (2021). Digital Technologies and the Future of Public Space. In: Wiring the Streets, Surfing the Square. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66672-9_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66671-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66672-9
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)