Conference ask for bridges between analogue and digital world

Just as industrial society demolished medieval city walls, the information society is transcending geographical limitations. Binary code can create virtual realities, and with them free spaces which stand in contrast to the socio-spatial limits of physical locations. Fewer and fewer specific places are required to fulfil specific functions or provide services. At the same time, life for most city dwellers remains determined by infrastructure and the qualities and barriers of the physical.

 

With its global economy, the information society will encroach deep into our cities (Manuel Castells)

 

How can this encroachment be (co-)influenced among other by the shapers of the analog city? And during this process, how can different professional practice and perceptions on the one hand the digital bohemians with their global conferences and publications, on the other hand the municipal experts from city institutions take a step closer together and become connected?

 

A mixture of virtual and real combinations will react to increasingly flexible and dynamic modes of living. The nature of this mixture is dependent on the positions and standpoints regarding the city that today are diverse in their contradictions. What can be done to counteract a polarisation of digital and analog living environments? How can digital globetrotters be motivated to relocate their projects, free floating in network environments, in the flesh and stone (Sennett) of the cities? What spaces of possibility (linked to the concept of the European city) can be created for the newly emerging modes of living? And by whom?

 

These questions and more are the focus of the conference The City of Flows Interdisciplinary perspectives on the digital city in analog spaces. International speakers from academia and practice have been invited to speak on the following topic clusters:

Initially, todays conceptualisations, technologies and visualisations of a modern mapping of the city will be presented. The conceptualisations include web-based mapping projects (e.g. Google Mashups), projects centring on resident participation and agitation with the help of location-based services and interventionist artwork. The (continual) mapping combined with aesthetic, interactive-dynamic visualisation and the provision of urban data (flows) represents an important basis for discussion and decision-making processes in the city.

On-going issues of climate change and ecological urban restructuring are also bringing urban living environments into question. Behavioural changes are necessary and are being tested through neighbourhood projects, integrated mobility concepts and connections between living, work and leisure. New communities of responsibility are emerging which are supported, facilitated and inspired by information and communication technologies. This process is redefining the relationship (which characterises European cities) between public and private life.

Until very recently, urban culture has been determined by buildings and institutions: museums, theatres, concert halls, libraries, academies/universities and socio-cultural centres as well as palaces, parks and churches: all are witnesses to our cultural heritage. Set in stone, the representation as well as the functional responsibility of these outdated institutions are mixed up by the information and network society, then either rejected or re-evaluated. In the informational city, old education and cultural institutions such as libraries reflect with particular clarity the structural changes of the digital society.

A city can no longer be governed from the top down. Municipal policy is now far more characterised by a complex mesh of compromise and cooperation between politics/administration, business and civil society groups. Orderly civic participation and processes suffer repeated disturbance due to unpredicted protests, civil initiatives and spontaneous outbursts of indignation. This both confuses procedures and brings into question formalised participation. In either case, information and communication technologies act as important agencies and amplifiers for developments. But do they also contribute something to those intersections that exist between outrage and participation?