- Rio Hyperlocal: Social Media and Digital Landscape in the Process of Urban Redevelopment    click here to open paper content1063 kb
by    Torres, Yuri & Sá Antunes Costa, Lucia Maria | torres.yuri@gmail.com   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
The urban landscape is nowadays pictured digitally by a connected society. This study looks at Rio´s recent portuary zone improvement, analyses official and citizen generated contents on it, and discusses the digital space as a tool to enhance it.
Abstract
Urban landscape is nowadays inevitably related to a connected society and new forms of planning, building, managing, visualizing and exploring. Corner’s concept of active landscape (1999) is here reinterpreted as productive digital space, where cognitive and intuitive perceptions of landscape are pictured into a simultaneous representation, defined by Sterling as hyperlocal (2007).

Rio de Janeiro is experiencing a wave of landscape transformations in the context of upcoming events. Rio's portuary zone, once a declining central district, has since regained its vocation of active territory and has been the focus of a wider undergoing redevelopment plan to be concluded by 2016. Urban layout improvements, land use revision with incentives for private enterpreuners and investments on built environment are some of the strategies to turn the district into a prestigious touristic, business and entertainment lively zone.

For the very first time, this process is being entirely witnessed by society through constant media updates, freely reached from any connected device. Press material has been released periodically in an official webpage and timely spread to social media interfaces, such as blog, twitter and youtube. Didactic ways of visualization, with intensive use of photography and time-lapse videos covering the transformations of the district are instruments to achieve citizen's awareness about the
process.

This study looks at citizen-generated contents over this official propaganda and the physical/tactile transformations of this specific district. Methodologically, it seeks all sort of human-based data, as for many referred as digital footprints, that may define indicators able to measure the efficiency of the information provided, the evolution of local attractiveness and therefore the efficiency of the plan, provided by both quantitative (material/tangible) and qualitative (immaterial/ambient)
data analysis. It concludes discussing digital space as a tool to enhance physical urban space through citizen’s interaction, advocating its potentiality on the process of district renovation.

References:
Corner, J. (1999). Eidetic operations and new landscapes. In: Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. CornerJames. Princeton
Architectural Press: New York, US, 156–160.
Sterling, B. (2007). Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future, Wired, 15.07, 161-165
Keywords
urban landscape, digital landscape, hyperlocal
Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context
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