Interfacing the City: Media Theory Approach to Cognitive Mapping of the Smart City Through Urban Interfaces

摘要

The aim of the paper is to analyse the interface as a cognitive map of the smart city from a media-theoretic perspective. The issue of cognitive mapping in the context of urbanism was articulated in Lynch's The Image of the City where the notion of "image ability" or constructing a mental map of the spatial and environmental features of the city played the major role in how humans experience the city. Media theory sees the city as an information-processing medium that consists of both physical and digital layers, making the (smart) city a hybrid product made of "atoms and bits". Following Manovich, the paper argues that there is no necessary link between the digital data and their form, as digital material is a material without qualities which requires a certain form, that is an interface, to be perceived. The paper argues that the interface is 1) a relation between the visible surface layer and the deeper, invisible layer of a medium and 2) Norman's cognitive artefact which helps humans with information complexity and overload. Applying Haken and Portugali (2003), the paper asserts the information-centric view of the smart city. Lynch claimed that the future form of the city should allow experiencing the city as a whole by constructing a synthetic image. The paper suggests that the only solution to Lynch's requirement in the age of the smart city is designing an urban interface. Finally, the paper defines the urban interface and offers a brief selection of historical and contemporary examples of urban interfaces.