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The Relational Ecosystem in Cities

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Abstract

Expanding our understanding of ecosystems: This chapter introduces the concept of the Relational Ecosystem. The urban ecosystems, with all its actors of the multiple human and nonhuman types, seen from the point of view of the relations which emerge and form in its daily life. The chapter introduces the concept and moves on to the description of how relations in the city can be discovered, observed, and measured, starting from the types of data and information which can be captured from the various types of actors in the ecosystems (quantitative, qualitative, classification using ontologies and folksonomies, topic and emotion discovery using natural language analysis, topic/emotion networks and their evolution in time, and relational networks and their evolution in time), and the types of relationships which can be described and observed in this perspective (strength and persistence of relations; vertical, horizontal, transversal relations; liminal relations). The chapter ends with an interview with Massimo Canevacci.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    California Institute for Smart Communities (2001). Ten Steps to Becoming a Smart Community. Retrieved from http://www.smartcommunities.org/library_10steps.htm.

  2. 2.

    ICT: Information and Communication Technologies.

  3. 3.

    For a detailed technical and technological description of the techniques used we suggest to look up our “Urban Acupuncture in the Era of Ubiquitous Media.”, which contains very detailed descriptions of the algorithms, software tools and instrumentation which we use for this process. You can look it up in the references at the end of the book, or grab it on our website at http://www.human-ecosystems.com.

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Correspondence to Salvatore Iaconesi .

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Iaconesi, S., Persico, O. (2017). The Relational Ecosystem in Cities. In: Digital Urban Acupuncture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43403-2_6

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