New mediated spaces and the urban environment.

摘要

The contemporary city has become an amalgam of digital and physical space. How urban form is understood and valued, and how populations navigate that space, is more reliant on public and commercial demand for networked communication technologies than ever before. Using multiple qualitative research methods and approaches, this dissertation investigates the lived relationships between urban places, people, and networked technologies at three different scales: the global, the city, and the street.;This project interrogates the work of those who professionally program urban space as well as the experiences of those who live within it. By comparing top-down plans, imaginations, regulations, and actions with bottom-up practices, experiences, and texts, this dissertation explores relations of power that manifest in the re-organization and re-production of the city through new media technologies. In the first half of this dissertation I analyze case studies of ubiquitous cities (U-cities) in South Korea and municipal WiFi plans in the United States in order to illustrate the political economic and socio-cultural imaginations of IT infrastructure and emergent technologies in urban environments. The second half focuses on vernacular experiences of the relationships between screened space and physical space in the contemporary city. I investigate expressions of everyday life produced for locative media projects Yellow Arrow and [murmur]. I also examine the wayfinding and cognitive mapping strategies of navigation technology users, comparing them to Kevin Lynch's findings in The Image of the City some fifty years ago.;Through these four case studies, two main arguments emerge. I argue that various networked technologies and practices are employed by urban planners and residents in order to re-produce the social, digital, and physical layers of the city as a place; an action I describe in this dissertation as re-placeing the city. Second, I re-conceptualize networked mobility as something other than a distanciated and disembedded human experience. I illustrate how new media-assisted mobility is perpetually subject to place-based logics, knowledges, and embedded within place-based cultures, situations, and experiences.