VersuS, The Digital Lives of Cities Transforms into Usable Interconnective Intelligence

While we perform our daily tasks we reinterpret space and personalize it, according to tactics which reveal significant information about ourselves. We are now able to fill and stratify space/time with digital information layers, completely wrapping cities in a membrane of information and of opportunities for interaction and communication. Mobile devices, smartphones, wearables, digital tags, near field communication devices, location based services and mixed/augmented reality have turned the world into an essentially read/write, ubiquitous publishing surface. The usage of mobile devices and ubiquitous technologies alters the understanding of place. The scenario described in this paper sees urban spaces progressively filling with multiple layers of real-time, ubiquitous, digital information, creating usage cases in which urban narratives are read in different ways, highlighting how cities express points of view on the environment, culture, economy, transports, energy and politics. The research presented in this paper analyses multiple opportunities to capture, understand and visualize the real-time digital lives of cities, from a variety of points of view and objectives, dedicated to the needs of administrations, citizens and organizations, and to the possibility to transform these representations into a form of disseminated, ubiquitous, interconnective intelligence.