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Cisco’s Urban Ecomaps and Medialab-Prado’s In the Air: How to move from awareness about environmental problems to action?
Recently I was a panelist at the Electrosmog Festival in Amsterdam. My session was called Hyper-mobility and the urban condition and featured two interesting projects that made use of digital media to attune our increasing mobility to the sustainable development of our cities: Cisco’s Urban Ecomap (part of Connected Urban Development ) presented by Bas Boorsma and In…
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Design Approaches for the 21st Century City
At The Mobile City, we are currently researching the design processes that shape the cities of the 21st century, and bumped into an interesting paradox (also pointed out by others): The experience of our present day city in every day life is increasingly a hybrid one – meaning that it is made up of both…
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Augmented Reality: its promises and shortcomings for architects
Last week our friends & collegues at Vurb and Non-Fiction organized an evening about the opportunities of Augmented Reality for architects. Layer-developer Johannes la Poutre presented some of his recent projects, and Ole Bouman – director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute – was interviewed about SARA – an AR-app developped by the NAi. It…
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Sonic Acts 2010: On the Poetics of Hybrid Space
I just visited an interesting panel on the Sonic Acts 2010 Conference called The Poetics of Hybrid Space. When over here at The Mobile City we talk about Hybrid Space, we usually refer to the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva who in several articles has convincingly argued against the dichotomy between physical or…
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Florida vs Hamburg
A little while ago I came across a manifesto called Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg (Sign and Sight has an English translation). In this manifesto a group of 200 artists/squaters criticise their supposed role in the cycle of life of their city, Hamburg. Using artists as tools to ‘spice up’ a city leads to gentrification, they say.…
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Cartography: the old versus the new? an evening in De Balie
On December 14th 2009 De Balie – an Amsterdam-based center for culture and politics – organized an evening about old and new cartographies. Participants were Ferjan Ormeling (Emeritus Professor Cartography, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University), Henk van Houtum (Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography, Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research), Maarten…
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“How can architects relate to digital media?” TMC keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’
(download as PDF >>) How can architects relate to digital media? The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal Introducing the main questions What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and…
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Article in Second Nature journal about The Mobile City project and urban gaming
The second issue of the RMIT journal Second Nature is about “Games, Locative & Mobile Media”. I wrote a short article about urban games and their importance for the issues we address with The Mobile City. In this article I discern five possible ‘levels’ to understand urban games: (1) the city is often used as…
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Report of the Sentient Rotterdam Workshop (Nov 6th 2009)
On November 6th 2009 The Mobile City organized the Sentient Rotterdam Workshop in collaboration with Mark Shepard. About 20 participants from varying disciplines came together to discuss the role of sentient technology in urban culture. Participants were divided in small groups of 4-5 people to work on a possible intervention in the city of Rotterdam…
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Three philosophical questions about the ‘sentient city’ – a response to the exhibition Towards the Sentient City
At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the discipline. At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal change.…
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Picnic 09 Report 2: The City as an Interaction Platform
At Picnic I attended an interesting session called The City as an Interaction Platform that took this theme as its point of departure: Cities have always been about providing frameworks of services to improve the quality of life for residents and businesses. How will social networks, mobile devices, reactive environments, and cloud-based data services transform…