Shows how digital media connects people to their lived environments Every day, millions of people turn to small handheld screens to search for their destinations and to seek recommendations for places to visit. They may share texts or images of themselves and these places en route or after their journey is complete. We don’t consciously reflect on these activities and probably don’t associate these practices with constructing a sense of place. Critics have argued that digital media alienates users from space and place, but this book argues that the exact opposite is true: that we habitually use digital technologies to re-embed ourselves within urban environments. The Digital City advocates for the need to rethink our everyday interactions with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Drawing on five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placeing,” Germaine R. Halegoua shows how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to turn urban spaces into places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through timely narratives of everyday urban life, Halegoua argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media.

Evolving out of a research project on information technology and society, the book explores the digitization of the American city. Laguerre examines the impact of changes to various sectors of society, brought about by the advent of information technology and the Internet upon daily life in the contemporary American metropolis. The book focuses on actual information technology practices in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco metropolitan area, explaining how those practices are remoulding social relations, global interaction and the workplace environment.

Since the late 1990s, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been hailed as a potentially revolutionary feature of the planning and management of Western cities. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have exploited these new technologies; city management has experimented with electronically distributed services, and participation in public life and democratic decision-making processes can be made more flexible by the use of ICTs. All of these technological initiatives have often been presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site known as 'digital city' or 'city network.' Illustrated by a range of European case studies, this volume examines the social, political and management issues and potential problems in the establishment of an electronic layer of information and services in cities. The book provides a better understanding of the direction European cities are going towards in the implementation of ICTs...

Both a textbook for GIS classes in urban planning and a workbook for local governments, this book shows how to do real tasks that are required when a city decides to go digital and use geographic information systems (GIS) to store and access information. With this book, planners, analysts, and other local government staff use data from a real city to perform tasks such as creating buildings and parcels, setting coordinate systems, and building geodatabase topology. After creating a geodatabase, working with attribute data, and geocoding data, planners will be able to perform spatial analysis to find possible drug houses near playgrounds, find buildable vacant lots, produce land use reports, and more.

On the way towards the Information Society, global networks such as the Internet, together with mobile computing, have made wide-area computing over virtual communities a reality. Digital city projects, with the goal of building platforms to support community networking, are going on worldwide. This is the first book devoted to digital cities. It is based on an international symposium held in Kyoto, Japan, in September 1999. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book; they reflect the state of the art in this exciting new field of interdisciplinary research and development. The book is divided into parts on design and analysis, digital city experiments, community network experiments, applications, visualization technologies, mobile technologies, and social interaction and communityware.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the various aspects for the development of smart cities from a European perspective. It presents both theoretical concepts as well as empirical studies and cases of smart city programs and their capacity to create value for citizens. The contributions in this book are a result of an increasing interest for this topic, supported by both national governments and international institutions. The book offers a large panorama of the most important aspects of smart cities evolution and implementation. It compares European best practices and analyzes how smart projects and programs in cities could help to improve the quality of life in the urban space and to promote cultural and economic development.

Recent developments in information and communication technology (ICT) have paved the way for a world of advanced communication, intelligent information processing and ubiquitous access to information and services. The ability to work, communicate, interact, conduct business, and enjoy digital entertainment virtually anywhere is r- idly becoming commonplace due to a multitude of small devices, ranging from mobile phones and PDAs to RFID tags and wearable computers. The increasing number of connected devices and the proliferation of networks provide no indication of a sl- down in this tendency. On the negative side, misuse of this same technology entails serious risks in various aspects, such as privacy violations, advanced electronic crime, cyber terrorism, and even enlargement of the digital divide. In extreme cases it may even threaten basic principles and human rights. The aforementioned issues raise an important question: Is our society ready to adopt the technological advances in ubiq- tous networking, next-generation Internet, and pervasive computing? To what extent will it manage to evolve promptly and efficiently to a next-generation society, ado- ing the forthcoming ICT challenges? The Third International ICST Conference on e-Democracy held in Athens, Greece during September 23–25, 2009 focused on the above issues. Through a compreh- sive list of thematic areas under the title “Next-Generation Society: Technological and Legal issues,” the 2009 conference provided comprehensive reports and stimulated discussions on the technological, ethical, legal, and political challenges ahead of us.

This book examines the phenomenon of the “digital city” in the US by looking at three case studies: New York City, San Antonio, and Seattle. Kristin Scott considers how digital technologies are increasingly built into the logic and organization of urban spaces and argues that while each city articulates ideals such as those of open democracy, civic engagement, efficient governance, and enhanced security, competing capitalist interests attached to many of these digital technological programs make the “digital city” problematic.

Edited by thought leaders in the fields of urban informatics and urban interaction design, this book brings together case studies and examples from around the world to discuss the role that urban interfaces, citizen action, and city making play in the quest to create and maintain not only secure and resilient, but productive, sustainable and viable urban environments. The book debates the impact of these trends on theory, policy and practice. The individual chapters are based on blind peer reviewed contributions by leading researchers working at the intersection of the social / cultural, technical / digital, and physical / spatial domains of urbanism scholarship. The book will appeal not only to researchers and students, but also to a vast number of practitioners in the private and public sector interested in accessible content that clearly and rigorously analyses the potential offered by urban interfaces, mobile technology, and location-based services in the context of engaging people with open, smart and participatory urban environments.