Intro
Since the Industrial Revolution we have used technology to overcome the barriers imposed by space, creating a significant transformation of the economy and territory, also recognizable by a specific lifestyle.
The pace of life of the human condition is time, and our position in space, or in a territory, is relevant only in terms of the temporal distance of commodity flows, which we need access to build our social identity.
Hypothesis
Social Media (Internet) promotes Located Collective Intelligence which in turn activates the Spatial Dimension and strengthens Proximity communities.
Self-organized and connected citizens promote activities, dynamics and new urban spaces which do not respond to traditional market logic, and are independent of local government systems at the same time. People can design and be in control of their own life.
What is collective intelligence?
It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills…
No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in Humanity…
New communication systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge. This is not simply a matter of modeling the conventional physical environment, but of enabling members of delocalized communities to interact within a mobile landscape of signification…
The ideal of collective intelligence implies the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization.
Objectives
The aim of this work is to demonstrate and describe how the expanding use of the Internet is reclaiming the value of the spatial dimension, which was lost after the Industrial Revolution.
In the early ‘90s Saskia Sassen talked about the global city, highlighting the political and economic weight of the largest urban agglomerations in the context of globalization helped by the amazing technological development.
The economic strength and technological advances allow us to travel at high speed with relatively low cost.
While this process at first has fed our disconnection with the spatial dimension, we can notice now some dynamics that clearly project us in the opposite direction.
The deliberate creation of a system of expression for the the Knowledge space will enable us to correctly express, and perhaps even resolve, a number of crucial problems that we are currently unable to formulate adequately with the concepts and tools that have been used to express preceding spaces… Internetworked data would then provide the technical infrastructure for the collective brain or hypercortex of living communities. The role of information technology and digital communications is not to “replace mankind” but to promote the construction of intelligent communities in which our social and cognitive potential can be mutually developed and enhanced.
(Pierre Levy 1994)
Pierre Levy talks about how new technologies can help us to generate collective intelligence. However, in his reflection he does not mention the possibility and the enormous potential that can emerge when this collective intelligence is directly related to a specific territory.
The objective of this research is to study how a local community uses the new dynamic technologies that may have a positive impact on the territory.
Better community connection highlights new concerns that can only be solved relying on the neighbour next door. If I want to eat healthy, and I want a fair compensation for people who produce the food, I can only accomplish these objectives by generating processes of collective intelligence with my neighbours, since traditional mechanisms only take into consideration the economic aspects of everything, regardless the community or certain ethical values.
This gave rise to consumer groups, hyperlocal structures in which neighbours can organize themselves to buy fresh produce directly from the producers.
Researcher: Domenico Di Siena
PhD candidate from Technical University of Madrid, and visiting researcher at CRESC | Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change
PhD supervisor: Prof. Jose Fariña
Technical University of Madrid
More
If you are interested in Shareable City you can visit my web with a selection of articles and projects > http://shareablecity.net.
If you are interested in my texts about Urban Innovation, Collective Intelligence and Network Thinking you can read my personal blog > http://urbanohumano.org.
