The lure of Cyberpark

Abstract

This paper highlights the emerging concept of the CyberPark - the hybridized relationship between open public places and technologically mediated urban activity patterns. The concept questions whether urban space can keep binding people and their outdoor practices in new meaningful ways, but in fact, what is being asked is whether the relationship between ICT, open public spaces and urban activities can open up creative pathways for a multidisciplinary field. Projecting the transformative shifts not only in the way people choose, move and experience open spaces in cities but also from the impacts of the extensive outdoor use of digital media technologies such as wireless sensor networks, GNSS or cellular networks enabled by mobile devices, into the same coordinate space can transform the oppositional conditions in our understanding of the stroller/machine relationship. This paper introduces a synergistic user-centred methodology for deriving effective strategies for the appropriation and use of wireless urban spaces. To achieve this, it unfolds the first results from the CyberParks Project to help us locate its concept into the possibility of an enhanced form of open urban space that exceeds the “any space”.