I will be presenting at two pannels on Amsterdam’s yearly Picnic Conference.
On Wednesday September 14th I am part of a session I co-organize with The Mobile City, together with Michiel de Lange and Virtueel Platform : Future Cities: Designing for Ownership:
The “Smart City” paradigm in urban design promises a future in which our cities will be more efficient and sustainable, thanks to the advent of digital media technologies. That’s great of course, but are cities really all about calculation and efficiency? In this session we present “ownership” as an alternative design approach. How can we engage new technologies to keep our ever more complex cities livable and lively for humans? How can we design cities where citizens feel they belong, and feel the city belongs to them as well? Where they have the power to act on communally shared issues? In short: how can digital media aid in strengthening a sense of “ownership” among urbanites?
This session is the official launch of the study “Ownership in the Hybrid City”, conducted by Virtueel Platform and The Mobile City. A copy of the study will be available for all participants.
The next day, Thursday the 15th I was invited to a session organized by the European Journalism Centre, called From Database Cities to Urban Stories
Using technology to run our cities: promises and perils
Our cities are increasingly becoming data-rich environments. The ecology of apps, visualizations and location-based or context-aware media and information systems generated around urban data environments, have the potential to radically transform the way we understand, inhabit and build our cities.
The first European Journalism Centre (EJC) session will bring leading thinkers from academia and the arts to explore the implications of the instruments we use to make sense of our cities on our experience and understanding of cities, as well as on issues of governance and policy making. What are the advantages of the practices and instruments we use today to better understand the processes that govern our cities? What are the perils? What are the politics of these infrastructures? How are they positioned within larger social, cultural, environmental and political concerns? What kinds of futures can we imagine? How do we design infrastructures that help support active citizen engagement? What are the appropriate forms of urban planning, design and policy?
Whether you are interested in technology design, media production, or policy making focused on issues of urbanization and media technologies, or developing services around data, this session will give you the opportunity to enter into a conversation with various experts about the issues that you care about.