The Third Infoscape: Data, Information and Knowledge in the city. New paradigms for urban interaction

TL;DR

The paper discusses the evolution of the Third Infoscape, emphasizing how pervasive sensors and virtual interactions transform urban knowledge, creating a new landscape where physical and virtual data merge seamlessly.

Contribution

It introduces a new paradigm for understanding urban spaces through pervasive sensing and virtuality, proposing a shift from physical mapping to recombinant, telepathic-like information landscapes.

Findings

Urban data becomes a landscape of virtual densities.

Sensor networks enable emergent, polyphonic city representations.

Virtuality collapses physical-virtual boundaries in urban environments.

Abstract

The Third Infoscape refers to the information and knowledge generated through the myriads of micro-histories, through the progressive, emergent and polyphonic sedimentation of the expressions of the daily lives of city dwellers. To all effects, with the development of wireless sensors, of smart dust1, and with the possibility to engage human beings in urban sensing processes, the dimension of virtuality collapses. Heading towards a state which is basically comparable to the one of telepathy (among human beings, human beings and machines, machines and machines...), reconfiguring urban ecologies so that mapping virtuality or physicality would not be needed anymore, and replacing this need with the possibility to create recombinant inventories of the telepathic migration of dusts, of the myriads of pulverized sensors which are disseminated, diffused. We can imagine information mutating into landscape, delineating an urban space which is not determined by distance and time, but from the transformation of densities and presences.