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Sensing the City: Legibility in the context of mediated spatial terrains (powerpoint)
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Powerpoint Presentation: The Idea of Place’ Space and Culture Conference: May 6, 7th and 8th, Edmonton, Alberta Canada.
Title:
Sensing the City: Legibility in the context of mediated spatial terrainsAbstract:
Smartphones, with their ‘pervasive presence’ (Leszczynski, 2015) in contact with our bodies, have come to act as sensory prosthetics that mediate our experience of the city. They activate new possibilities of navigating the urban, such that we can find exactly what we want, rather than what has been placed before us. This ‘ambient findability’ (Morville, 2005), constitutes a new engagement with the world where, “information is in the air, literally. And it changes our minds, physically” (Ibid.).This paper argues that smartphone technologies produce a more fluid engagement with urban space: where space is not so much ‘given’ as ‘enacted’. In this context, notions of ‘legibility’ (Lynch, 1960) take on new, algorithmic and virtual forms. Thus, where “the legible city waited to be read, the transparent city of data waits to be accessed” (Hamilton et al., 2014). Stable features dissolve as urban space becomes increasingly fluid and contingent, no longer limited by static patterns of inhabitation. Instead, how we move and where we move shifts in accordance with the kinds of urban resources being activated at any given location, at any given moment, and in conjunction with the shifting vicissitudes of the crowd. In this context, the virtual (in its technological definition of cyber enabled or enacted space), mediates and activates the virtual, (in its philosophical definition pertaining to the capacities of an entity that may or may not be manifested depending upon context) (DeLanda, 2005). The paper considers the implications of this novel spatial mediation, using an ontological perspective informed by Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory. CAS considers forms and objects not as absolutes, but rather as contingent entities activated through interactions.
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- Date created
- 2017-05-23
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- Type of Item
- Conference/Workshop Presentation