NET_CITY: A collaborative Environment to promote the Understanding of the Contemporary City

CITIES, understood as structures of precise boundaries that are apprehended and visualized as a coherent whole, no longer exist. Both in their materialized forms—as an ensemble of physical objects—and in their abstract forms—as mental structures of interrelated elements—cities have lost their spatial identity; they have become parts of a global network of imprecise limits and unknown centers. Not only have the limits of cities been blurred, but the modes of perceiving cities have changed. Direct experience no longer suffices in order to have a proper idea of the city we live in. Today, our perception of cities is mediated by images found in tourist brochures, film, television, and on the Internet. Cities have become representations of the images of what they once were. Urban space—the territory in which cities are placed and through which they interact—has been absorbed into a most generic process of space production, especially after the advent of information technologies on a global scale. Physical and mental spaces, real and imaginary spaces, spaces for goods and information to flow through, and spaces for people to live in: all of these kinds of spaces have become interwoven in the contemporary city.