Cybercities: Mediated Public Open Spaces - A Matter of Interaction and Interfaces

In his 2002 motion picture Minority Report, based on the same name novel by Philip K. Dick from 1990, the director Steven Spielberg leads his main actor through a public open space (POS). In this 20-seconds scene, the actor gets, while escaping from prison, a lot of personalised advertising while the people around him are informed that he is a volatile criminal. The whole place with its infrastructure (screens, entrances, etc.) seems to be real-time responsive to the (fictional) situation - even to the operations elsewhere, shown in the scenes before and after. The phenomenon is the change of the POS to an innovative cyber one, in agreement to new concepts like smart city (Gibson et al. 1992; Hollands 2008). To answer the question “Which interactions is a POS in Cyber Cities capable for?”, the analysis of city planning processes is a good starting point.

In agreement with the vision shared by George Kubler in his book “The shape of time” the city design can be interpreted as a series of ideas in the history of human thinking, divided into four groups (Barnett 2016): Modern city design (Chandigarh), Traditional city design (Rome, Paris), Green city design (Surabaya) and System city design (Dubai). The main idea is that these listed concepts are not opposed to each other or mutually exclusive, rather they interplay with each other, being each one periodically more or less important (according to the duty of the project).

2.2 The Cyborg-Society and the Senseable City Concept

“Permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as we know it” (Clynes and Kline 1960: 29–33) was the starting point for rethinking the concept of the human body and its extensions and possibilities. This new way of thinking gave the perspective for the first cyborg project: “cyborg is a hybrid capable of more than either the biological or the mechanical system alone can do, with a correspondingly expanded range of possible habitation” (Ratti and Claudel 2016: 42–49). The tools and all innovations people have been aware, allowing humanity to survive in extreme conditions that they otherwise could never adapt. Serving as an additional option to the biological presence defines us as a kind of cyborg. “Human progress was marked by the gradual externalization of functions, from stone knives and axes that extended the capacity of the hand to the externalization of mental functions with the computer.” (Picon 2004: 114–121). If in the past the innovations were created as an enhancement of the physical body, today they are mainly used as an extension of the possibilities of the mind: “… digital technologies have become a dynamic extension of our bodies and minds, demanding a constant and two-way cybernetic exchange in a way that our traditional (one-way) extensions, such as clothing or axes, have never done” (Ratti and Claudel 2016: 42–49). Interesting aspects appeared, as the deep natural involvement of technological system into human environment. “We […] are provided with two types of bodies … the real body which is linked with the real world by means of fluids running inside, and the virtual body linked with the world by the flow of electrons” (Ito 1997: 132). Smartphones became the strongest connection between the two bodies and so recognised as an interface. It additionally extends humans memory and logical capacities in such a marked way that the person is not considered a simple human anymore but kind of an upgraded version of it: a post-human. “A new entity that is born with technology rather than acquiring it … where each individual’s mental and social existence is enable, sustained and improved by technologies.” (Ratti and Claudel 2016: 42–49).

The main technology mentioned are the so-called smart-devices. They are changing the way people think about a city and its infrastructure in a radical way: thanks to the rising of digital networks what before was passive is now active, so every aspect of an urban reality should now be able to be interfaced with smartphones. In simple words, a modern city should give the post-humans an environment suitable for them. With the rising of smart-devices still both methods from the intelligent city in the senseable city concepts, could be found. But with different notion:

• Tracking as the top-down method where the information is gathered and visualized for decision-makers, stakeholder, city council or researcher (Ratti et al. 2007).

• Interaction as the bottom-up example with, e.g. QR codes (Foth et al. 2015). The interaction includes human to human, human to companies (marketing) or authorities (information) or human to machine while the layer that carries the QR code is differently (i.e. cloths, streets, buildings, etc.)

The senseable city concept pushes further the interactivity of this innovative way of thinking about POS. In a short period, places became a breathing, living entity acting on a large-scale with the inhabitants (what we previously defined as cyborgs). The latter will create, plug into and interact with this new entity, and so, digital spaces will be naturally interacted and above all spontaneously born onto POS. This reality was, among others, mentioned and explained by Mark Weiser, ac-cording to which the interfaces would find no places anymore since everything will be intimately absorbed into the city. Allowing then a complete merging between the digital and the physical spaces a “new way of thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish into the background.” (Weiser 1991: 1). Another realisation of the senseable city concept can be found in the so-called boards, e.g. interactive screens disseminated all along the cities (Fig. 1) where POS infrastructure are transformed into intercommunicating interfaces, away from smartphones. Basically, these new generation billboards are in effect web browser applications capable of all the tracking and advertising functionalities known from any desktop website. So, what was oriented towards a single user before is now becoming public: a desktop browser turns to a public display where advertises take place, all integrated into the POS. This scene of the 2002’s Minority Report became reality.

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In summary, the senseable city concept can be resumed as the “Technology recedes into the background, and interaction is brought to the fore. Buildings and public open spaces can be simple-rather than voluptuous and shocking – but even more integrally vibrant and living” (Ratti and Claudel 2016: 62–73).

Although, as widely discussed in the previous sections, the city of the future completely neglects the necessity of having an interface between citizen and spaces (since the digital and the physical domains are perfectly interlaced between each other), nowadays they still are of fundamental importance since the progress is still making the first steps toward such reality. A brief overview of the basic concepts of interactions and of the various kinds of interfaces will been given in the present section.

According to the city design methods previously explained, the reality of a POS has changed over the last decades. They are not interpreted as physical spaces, but rather as entities that embrace different dimensions into the same system. In fact, according to the vision of Stanley Milgram (Milgram et al. 1992), space is made not only of physical characteristics, but it has also a mental image that lives in human mind. One step further in Philip K. Dick’s vision from Minority Report, it is a visual, digital representation of an individual view on a common base (the POS).

To understand this complex approach of POS, the three-different kind of scientific rationalities (Stepin 2008) will be introduced: the classical, non-classical and post-non-classical. The first kind of scientific rationality, the classical rationality, deals with what we may call simple systems, where all properties of its parts define the whole system. They are delimited against external components like space and time and their elements are causal deterministic. Such systems are essentially a mechanical combination of their components, whose interactions are completely neglected. Essentially, “the classic rationality approach analyses it by simply considering the properties of its different sections for then adding them up together to get the global overview of the set” (Khromova 2018: 28–33). For example, McLuhan’s (1964) vision of a social system made only of unidirectional interaction between the mass of people and the source of information (as television or radio) is efficiently described by the mean of the just introduced first kind of rationality.

When dealing with large systems including autonomous subsystem having a huge number of interactions between each other, the classical rationality approach becomes obsolete. It leads to the second kind of scientific rationality, the non-classical. With an integrated “control-block” the system has a build in feed-back loop for its elements and subsystems. The feedback of each element runs into a simple programme whose output determines the behaviour of the system. This ongoing reproduction of organised elements could be found in society (social objects), nature (organisms) or populations of any kind. The whole is more than its individual parts. A multicellular organism provides one of the best examples of a right application of the non-classical rationality. Nowadays design of POS is strongly related to the non-classical rationality concepts since the aim in creating harmony by considering all the components of the POS itself (Khromova 2018).

The last kind of scientific rationality, defined as post-non-classical, relates to systems evolving themselves through self-regulating. This kind of system is “characterized by the development that leads from one self-regulation type to another. Each newly developed level causes back effects on earlier formed ones and restructures them, the system thus acquires a new integrity. The system changes as new levels emerge, with new relatively autonomous subsystems being formed there. Openness, exchange of energy and information with the surrounding are key attributes of complex, self-developing systems. A modern city with its services exemplifies it. The self-regulating aspect is represented by the huge variety of different agencies such as the communal office, the land registry office, services for the city, etc., whose usefulness would vanish without a proper interaction with all other public authorities such as health services, police stations, etc. The post-non-classical rationality finds its applications in many recent projects aimed to update the city. One of the best examples is given by the Futurecraft project (Ratti and Claudel 2016), where planners don’t provide anymore a fixed, pre-conceived and so strict indication about what their vision of the city-design of the future will be. Basically, conditions, scenarios and consequences are shared and discussed. This method supports public debates and spreads ideas and alternatives where people construct new values and guides to POS design. By turning classical design of urban space upside-down, planners (not exclusively) called this approach mutations. Such mutations will then grow, evolve and finally end up in creating tangible artefacts (pre-interfaces) in the reality of the city. An example implementing the post-non-classical method is the Trash Track project from MIT senseable city lab, “where cheap tags equipped with GPS localization are applied to rubbish and a full-scale urban demonstration was created to test it. As a result, subsequent discussion and debate has led to systemic improvements by waste management companies, start-up companies that produce trash trackers, and, most importantly, citizens where inspired to reduce waste and to recycle” (Ratti and Claudel 2016). Switching back to our topic of interest, a synergetic urban landscape like a POS equipped with ICT may be represented by the post-non-classical scientific rationality.

One should also notice that, according to what has been said and to the examples that has been given, the three proposed approaches for describing and interpreting a generic system don’t abolish nor replace each other. Contrarily to what one can think, the post-non-classical vision, although clearly more complete in respect to the classic one, is not always the best choice since sometimes its complexity can be completely avoided, resulting in a much immediate and practical interpretation of the system under investigation.

With the ternary system of public spaces, the co-existence of bottom-up and top-down methods in senseable city systems are proven. Which one of the scientific rationalities (between the classic, non-classic and post-non-classic) is more suitable to a POS equipped with ICT strongly depends on the attitude of the planner. This fact also remarks how each new type of rationality doesn’t imply the rejection of the previous one, but only completes our set of tools for analysing any kind of system, from the simplest ones (where the classic kind of rationality is preferred) to the more complex ones (where the post-non-classical is often the right choice). The tools could be part of the interfaces.

Currently, interfaces that support tracking and interaction are not reduced to smartphone. Rather they harness IoT and possibly change to tools for analysing and interaction. We have also shown that the interfaces, beside mobile devices, are deeply underdeveloped in their usage for a cyberpark, compared with their possibilities. But, comparing Mark Weiser’s vision for computer[s] for the 21st century (Weiser 1991), the have developed further. The way disseminating information from the cyberspace to the user, i.e. the interfaces and their different types, is being a real-time connection between city-planner and all the other components of the cyber-area. The role of city-planners (and their computers!) in a senseable city has to be redefined.

Further work has also to be done in order to deeply investigate what may be the weak points of the conception of cyberparks, such as the growing information pollution and peoples experience with the (digital) urban environment. According to that, the political structures and decision-making process must be updated to a real-time information system. Therefore, additional efforts should also be put in realizing a structure where individuals can choose how much they want to be involved in the cyber dimension, according their needs and comfort. The ground level for this structure could be the total absence of the cyber interaction and a balanced synergy between personal will and pre-built scenarios. Realtime, reactive POS, by the way described in the beginning, are possible, but nevertheless they lack the connection between their users, their inherent systematics and the quality of interfaces. Minority Report with the vision of Philip K. Dick is only a shadow of today’s capabilities.