Digital and mobile media play an increasingly important role in everyday urban life. They are changing the way urban life takes shape and how we experience our built environment. This seems a mainly practical matter: thanks to these technologies we can organize our lives more conveniently. But the rise of these 'urban media' also presents us with an important philosophical issue: What do they mean for how the city functions as a community? Employing detailed examples of new media uses as well as historical case studies, Martijn de Waal shows how new technologies, on one level, contribute to the further individualization and liberalization of urban society. There is an alternative future scenario, however, in which digital media construct a new definition of the urban public sphere. In the process they also breathe new life into the classical republican ideal of the city as an open, democratic 'community of strangers'.--Back cover.

This open access book presents a selection of the best contributions to the Digital Cities 9 Workshop held in Limerick in 2015, combining a number of the latest academic insights into new collaborative modes of city making that are firmly rooted in empirical findings about the actual practices of citizens, designers and policy makers. It explores the affordances of new media technologies for empowering citizens in the process of city making, relating examples of bottom-up or participatory practices to reflections about the changing roles of professional practitioners in the processes, as well as issues of governance and institutional policymaking.

In 1956, IBM tapped the industrial designer and architect Eliot F. Noyes to reinvent the company s corporate image, from stationery and curtains to typewriters and computers to laboratory and administration buildings. IBM would go on to assemble a cast of leading figures in American design, including Charles Eames, Paul Rand, George Nelson, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., who transformed the relationships between design, computer science, and corporate culture. "The Interface" is the first critical history of the industrial design of the computer and an invaluable perspective on the computer and corporate cultures of today."

Peri-urban interfaces - the zones where urban and rural areas meet - suffer from the greatest problems to humans caused by rapid urbanization, including intense pressures on resources, slum formation, lack of adequate services such as water and sanitation, poor planning and degradation of farmland. These areas, home to hundreds of millions of people, face unique problems and need distinctive and innovative approaches and solutions. This book, authored by top researchers and practitioners, covers the full breadth and depth of the impacts of rapid urbanization on livelihoods, poverty and resources in the peri-urban zones in diverse African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Topics include peri-urban resource sustainability, ecosystems and societies and environmental changes in peri-urban zones. Rich case studies cover production systems and livelihoods including the impacts of irrigated vegetable production, horticulture, dairy enterprises, waste-fed fisheries and pastoral livelihoods. Also addressed are planning and development issues in the peri-urban interface including the difficulty in achieving sustainability, conflict and cooperation over resources, and a fresh look at the relationship between people and their environment. The final part of the book presents policies and strategies for promoting and measuring sustainability in peri-urban zones including community-based waste management, the co-management of watersheds and empowerment of the poor. This book is the most comprehensive examination of the challenges and solutions facing the people and environments of peri-urban zones and is essential reading for all practitioners, students and academics in geography and development.

How the interface has moved from the PC into cultural platforms, as seen in a series of works of net art, software art and electronic literature. The computer interface is both omnipresent and invisible, at once embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud, and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface's disruption of everyday cultural practices. They present a new interface paradigm of cloud services, smartphones, and data capture, and examine how particular art forms—including net art, software art, and electronic literature—seek to reflect and explore this paradigm. Andersen and Pold argue that despite attempts to make the interface disappear into smooth access and smart interaction, it gradually resurfaces; there is a metainterface to the displaced interface. Art can help us see this; the interface can be an important outlet for aesthetic critique. Andersen and Pold describe the “semantic capitalism” of a metainterface industry that captures user behavior; the metainterface industry's disruption of everyday urban life, changing how the city is read, inhabited, and organized; the ways that the material displacement of the cloud affects the experience of the interface; and the potential of designing with an awareness of the language and grammar of interfaces.

Drawing on his own expertise in the humanities and on the Web, Steven Johnson not only demonstrates how interfaces - those buttons, graphics, and words on the computer screen through which we control information - influence our daily lives, but also tracks their roots back to Victorian novels, early cinema, and even medieval urban planning. The result is a lush cultural and historical tableau in which today's interfaces take their rightful place in the lineage of artistic innovation. With a distinctively accessible style, Interface Culture brings new intellectual depth to the vital discussion of how technology has transformed society, and is sure to provoke wide debate in both literary and technological circles.