CALL FOR PAPERS
MEDIA CITY 5 International Conference and Exhibition
1st 3rd May 2015
Plymouth University, UK
http://mediacity.i-dat.org<http://mediacity.i-dat.org/home/>
The theme of the fifth MEDIACITY conference is reflecting on social smart
cities.
Much of our thinking around technology and the city is based around
polarising paradigms. On one hand we have the smart city agenda that is
underpinned by a vision of data-centred optimisation of urban systems and
on the other hand we have a open-source, citizen driven approach based
around ad-hoc practices and prototyping of counter-culture scenarios.
These paradigms of city visions are described variously through terms such
as “digital city, screen city, media city, sentient city, u-city, fusion
city, hybrid city, intelligent city, connectiCity, pervasive city and the
smart city” and we seek to look beyond the rhetoric and critically reflect
and imagine new models and approaches to media and the city. We want to
challenge over-simplified assumptions around terms such as smart city, and
understand in more detail the complex interactions between social actors
and technological transformations of the city. The aim of the conference
is to consider more fully the multiple, subtle, and interdependent
spatio-temporalities which together work to constitute ICT-based urban
change. In particular we will discuss models of participation, action and
agency, shifting capacity to act beyond the ‘like’ button and to take
responsibility for the future shape of the city.
The conference addresses the approaches and the corresponding design
responses that meet the challenges of social, citizen-centred, smart
cities and communities. It will offer reflective, high quality theoretical
and design-based responses to the question of how media and ICTs can
create alternative responses to current societal challenges.
Topics
We will look at urbanity and digital media and ideas of place and space
and reflect on new models, landscapes and frameworks in the social smart
city. We explore how ‘the city’ as a site of participation is enabled
through media and technology and modes of citizen participation and agency
as well as how temporal installations and urban prototyping enable us to
imagine other possible futures. We will also look to the Internet of
Things to explore the way in which objects increasingly become sentient
actors in urban life. Through this we will address broader issues of
resilience and sustainability and how these intertwine with media and
technological frameworks. We provisionally propose three main sub-themes:
Place
Urban Design, public place-making, network infrastructures and resilience
People
social participation, urban prototyping, big data and agency
Things
The Internet of Things (IoT), sentience, social memory and networked
objects.
The conference audience will be drawn from an interdisciplinary field of
architecture, geography, human computer interaction, planning, media
studies, art and sociology to gather and exchange multiple perspectives on
common challenges.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Submissions to be uploaded to the conference’s EasyChair website:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mc5
Paper abstracts
Paper submissions are a two-stage process. Authors are asked Continue reading
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