Urban Acupuncture in the era on Ubiquitous Media

Abstract

The concept of Urban Acupuncture as applied to a contemporary vision of cities, between ubiquitous technologies, social networks, sensors and cloud computing. From the possibility to listen in real time to the digital life of the city to the opportunity to design and implement novel models for participatory, co-creation practices for city governance, planning, culture, tourism, citizen activation.

The paper describes the construction process of a methodology and of the required set of digital tools which allow to enact Urban Acupuncture practices in cities with high numbers of social media interactions

Two case studies are included for the City of Rome and the City of Turin, showing two practical applications in the domains of culture and of multiculturalism, respectively.

The two cases have been performed in collaboration and with the support of the city administrations and, in the final remarks, they are used to produce an evaluation of the proposed methodology and a series of focuses for further research and investigation