Shareable City: citizens are the actors!

Our lifestyle as much as our economic and social model, have brought us to build community models, completely disconnected from the space we live in. Our glocal condition allows us to be connected with our neighbours as well as with family and friends of any other neighbourhood, or any city of the world. Paradoxically, we even tend to create an imbalance in getting closer to what is physically further. Our social relationships are growing disconnected from our immediate physical surrounding, increasingly further from our street, neighbourhood and city.

In such context, it is important to consider how our Social Identity is developing and how, as citizens, we can manage to remain members and actors of what makes the identity of our physical surrounding.

Meanwhile we continue working, experimenting and understanding how digital identity works, a new challenge is coming forth: the capacity to handle in real-time and context this digital identity according to where, and with whom we are.

Thanks to smartphones, Digital Identity follows us, and thus the digital dimension directly interacts with our physical environment.

We could define this real time synchronisation process of our identities as “sentient identity”, as to focus on its capacity to re-act, inter-act, and adapt according to the physical/digital environment we are in at all times.

This would mean a new social model of instantaneous connection, (both with people and your physical environment), based on physical proximity rather than a social structure of friends and common interests or degrees of friendship.

Interacting with the people who define one’s physical surrounding without having to add them as friends, in other words, with the only means of physical proximity, gives way to new spaces of opportunity and more attractive places.

We will find ourselves in a setting made of active agents based on nonstop information processes. And possibly, we will go from thinking cities to leaving them directly reflect our behaviour; go from the project and planning to a real-time spread out and horizontal organization.

Of course, we are referring to the capacity to foster society’s collective intelligence by means of physical-digital hybrid tools of situated technology: the capacity for places, services and infrastructures to promote social interaction and involvement.

We call Shareable City, a new city model based on a technological and social ecosystem where knowledge, collective enterprise and interactions between people and places foster new possibilities by means of a physical-digital hybridization.

An unconscious self-management becomes conscious and meaningful when people are aware of their actions having consequences. The Shareable City ecosystem includes a process to control and modify information with feedback, which allows to confront people to the consequences of their action.

Now we need to analyse in what way this new setting can give the citizens back their role in urban management, according to their own identity, taking advantage of flows and synergies between the physical and digital fields; analyse the processes that would allow anyone at any time to communicate with his neighbours to manage and change his habitat.

I’m working right now on this subject. You can read all my research papers here in this blog. I have a tumblr where I post all the information that I find about shareable city: http://shareable.city.

I am involved as well in Cercamia project: a new startup which are developing the technology and a social coin to promote shareable city.

Image by This Big City 

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About Shareable City you can read this article by April Rinne > Top 10 Reasons why 2014 will be the year of #shareablecities or this report by Shareable:

Sharing City Network

If you are interested in Shareable Cities, join Shareable in building the Sharing Cities Network with a donation!

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