Connecting the Dots: How Digital Culture Is Changing Urban Design

Abstract

The topic of agency in cities brings up a fundamental question that urban thinkers have been dealing with for a long time: to what extent does the physical form of the city influence the way people behave? How exactly, in other words, do urban forms act in themselves as of urbanity? We know that the relationship between people and their physical environments is not purely mechanical and could never be reduced to a simple functionalist explanation. A change in a city square's furniture, for example, will not deeply affect the way its users experience it. On the other hand, space is never neutral, and the discussion on agents as systems that are active, distinguished from their environment, and acting according to a predefined set of goals (Barandiaran, Di Paolo, Rohde, 2009) opens up the very possibility that urban forms might be considered themselves. Barandiaran et al. raised this issue when they asked if a niche could be regarded as an agent (Ibid, p.10). Although it is not a living system per se, it is the product of living (a colony of beavers, for example), and its capacity to provide its inhabitants the comfort and protection required to sustain the existence of the system (the colony itself) is the measure of its success. Urban forms act in a similar way in regards to urbanity. Created by numerous groups of following different sets of goals, visions and ideologies, they suggest a certain use that, even when faced with the possibility of normative rejection, makes them of change in the way people use and understand the city. The form of public spaces, in that sense, does impose certain barriers and openings that, for better or worse, affects the life between buildings as Jan Gehl (1987) would have put it.