Dot.City Ralationaler, Urbanismus und Neue Medien/Relational Urbanism and New Media

Cell phones, automatic teller machines, and the Internet have incontrovertibly become part of our daily lives, indistinguishable from other components of our habitual everyday activity. Life does not seem to have been fundamentally changed by these hi-tech, information-giving tools of convenience--or has it? Have we, unawares, become accustomed to a new way of living? And how can designers make creative use of these new digital possibilities? This publication of the Fourth International Bauhaus Kolleg--a year-long thematic graduate session run by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation--offers strategies for employing digital media to integrate the unpredictable and the unplanned into urban existence. Dot.City asks and answers many questions: Can the use of information and communication technology counteract the continuous processes of devaluation, the loss of urban identity, the lack of multifunctional networks? Can the activation and implementation of new social techniques of knowledge production compensate for missing economical impulses and functions? How do such processes generate new species of urban values? Is it possible to re-program local social resources using intelligent network technologies? What do urban action areas designed for this purpose look like? And how can urban information spheres and physical urban spaces penetrate each other?Blume, Torsten is the author of 'Dot.City Ralationaler, Urbanismus und Neue Medien/Relational Urbanism and New Media', published 2004 under ISBN 9783936314946 and ISBN 3936314942.