Pervasive Technologies and Urban Planning in the Augmented City

AS information and communication technologies (ICT) become ubiquitous in cities, there is a growing interest in initiatives that integrate the virtual and the physical in a manner that recognizes that cities are complex spatial entities being constantly re-constructed and redefined according to social and political interactions between their objects, elements, and actors. These initiatives to create, improve, and deploy new technologies are most frequently accomplished by the private sector. The public sector, meanwhile does little to oversee the implementation of these initiatives, does not provide alternatives, and does not develop its own initiatives. The main point of this paper is to show, through a study of Brazilian cities, that the discipline of urban planning is absent in discussions about public actions on physical and electronic spheres. The intermingling of physical and electronic space, resulting in what some scholars call “augmented space,” has redefined the way we conceive, use, plan, and control physical space in cities. This kind of augmentation is directly related to the expansion of our ability to communicate and “be present” in multiple and non-contiguous spaces with the same intensity, an ability made possible by using increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs). These augmented spaces, where physical and electronic elements are intrinsically Aurigi Firmino 2005 Graham Graham and Dominy Graham and Marvin Manovich