Abstract Summary
As digital technologies increasingly influence urban living, understanding their impact on city inhabitation and design is crucial. This paper, part of broader interdisciplinary PhD research, focuses on a mapping experiment exploring collective experiences in New York City, a global hub for technological innovation and immersive digital environments connecting people with the city. The mediated landscape of New York City, shaped by the omnipresent use of smartphones for transportation, food, work, and extensive online interactions, as well as the strategic presence of major tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, provides a context for critical exploration of the influence of digital technologies on urban environments. Using critical cartography, this research investigates the impact of digital technologies on both the experience and design of cities. For instance, it delves into how mobile smartphones alter citizens’ habits in cities and how data harvested from these devices informs understanding of spatial design. While digital technologies become more integrated into our daily lives, they influence urban evolution often leading to top-down design approaches. There is a lack of tools enabling urban designers to interpret these changes from a bottom-up perspective, which is essential for a comprehensive exploration of urban settings undergoing rapid transformations. Thus, this research tests out more explorative approaches of mapping by developing critical cartographies that unfold relationships between citizens, digital technologies and urban environments. Employing digital tools like open-source data, tempo-spatial modeling, animation, GPS tracking, scraping, and remote sensing, the mapping focuses on collective experiences in New York City. It includes diverse perspectives: first, from participants of the Fieldstation-studio at Columbia University exploring the city; second, physical site exploration through revisiting the places visited by Fieldstation participants; and last, via online platforms representing New York City urban environment. The project investigates different ways of representation of urban experiences, focusing on mediums, data collection methods, their limitations, and augmentations with tempo-spatial visualizations. Furthermore, the study considers the cultural and ethical dimensions of this data in responsible urban digitization. The presented mapping discusses a shift towards data-driven design, highlighting the importance of digital technologies as the ones that critically shape citizens' urban experiences. These investigations involve a comprehensive understanding of data acquisition and related consequences in spatial use and design among architects and urban designers. By exploration of digital technologies as a subject of mapping and as a tool in design, this research aims to bridge the gap between engineering and urban design practices. It envisions a collectively created urban environments that are not only technologically innovative but also focused on human experiences, responding to multilayered contexts of our cities.
