www.themobilecity.nl

"What happens to urban culture & identity when physical and digital spaces merge?"

The Mobile City is an initiative that focuses on locative and mobile media, urban culture and identity. We aim to bring professionals from different disciplines (academics, urban professionals, media designers, artists, telecom operators, etc) together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge?

Locative media and hybrid space
The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighborhoods and highway interchanges is overlaid with the ‘virtual space’ of electronic communication-, information- and observation-networks of GSM, GPS, CCTV, UMTS, WIFI, RFID, ETC. At the same time, the domain of digital space is increasingly becoming physical, an “internet of things”.

It is no longer useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical, or the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (not real or not material). The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into “hybrid space”. These developments in formerly separated domains profoundly influence the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity.