From Digital to Physical Spaces and Comeback: Some Feedback on City Transformations

Abstract

This work aims to connect the new information technologies with the transformations they have triggered on physical environment. If from one side is possible to understand that new information technologies create several possibilities for social relations, and for the exchange of information and knowledge, from the other side, it is still difficult to recognize how these technologies are distributed in physical space and what are the influences that they have in our everyday life. One of the main difficulties to read ICT effects on the physical Word is that: as they are ephemeral and in many cases invisible, is not always possible to know their position in space and to map their presence. Many recent researches are focused on the understanding of this relation. A survey conducted on the State Library of Queensland’s by Dan Hill, for example, showed that the distribution of the WI-FI system inside the building influenced the localization of people. This is true both at the scale of the single building as well as at the city scale. Matthew Zook underlines that even if Internet is a horizontal network, it grows around some hubs. Zook’s work highlights that the most important hubs correspond to the Word Global Cities, suggesting that the development of new information technologies contributes to make those cities more competitive. These two examples demonstrate that the presence of ICT contributes to raise the concentration of people and business, intensifying networking capacity. It has become clear that ICT influenced our lifestyle, reducing the distances between people, increasing our capacity to make relations and, as a consequence, creating new possibilities and new reasons to live and to travel trough a wider territory. At the same time, people using ICT are sensors making possible to analyse the physical world and the on-going transformations. Going through some research projects that use innovative technologies to study urban space, we will understand the importance of this tool to comprehend the processes in act.