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Chapter 88
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8614-4.ch088
A Theoretical Model for
Digital Reverberations of City
Spaces and Public Places
ABSTRACT
The increasing pervasiveness of Internet connected devices and services is altering the perception and
practice of public spaces through the provisioning of location-specifc digital information. Location-
aware technologies allow people to access, annotate, address and attach information to locations, which
transforms the space for other people who use the same services. Such locations acquire relevance and
reshape social and spatial interactions through increased use on social media as people ‘check-in’ to
places, photograph or ‘like’ them. Collectively the authors are marking-up the city around them. The
popularization of location-aware technologies thus contributes to the changing meaning of locations
in cities. In contrast to the technological focus in the emerging discourses on smart cities and big data,
this paper ofers an alternative view of the three lenses of Social, Local and Mobile technologies that
describe and explain crowd-sourced socio-technical layers on the city landscape. The proposed integrated
theoretical model describes the relevant information linkages between people and places in the online
and ofine worlds and introduces a new evaluation method for the evaluation of city places: afnity
spectrum of social endorsements. The authors conclude with a discussion of the new opportunities for
governments to better understand socially emergent ‘urban qualities’ and how citizens construct and
appreciate them in order better convert city places into public spaces.
Christopher Zimmerman
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Kjeld Hansen
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Ravi Vatrapu
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark & Norwegian School of Information Technology (NITH),
Norway