Project Introduction
C3PLACES – using ICT for Co-Creation of inclusive public Places
Inclusive & digital communities
Co-creation of public open spaces
Community involvement
Web-mobile technologies
Public space users and their social practices
C3PLACES aims at developing strategies and tools to increase the quality of public open spaces through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by influencing positively co-creation and social cohesion effects.
In the last decades ICT have grown into an important social medium. People build and maintain the relationships through various social media, and increasingly this affects the way they organise their everyday lives and how they use the city and its spaces. Yet, diversity of public open spaces remains critical for cultural identity development, as they provide important gathering points in the urban fabric and offer the place for interactions among generations and ethnicities. People of all ages still need contact with nature and with other people, to develop different life skills, values and attitudes, to be healthy, satisfied with their lives and environmentally responsible. C3PLACES will generate knowledge and know-how for a co-creation approach to be used to merge the use of ICT with these essential functions of the public spaces. It will explore the new dynamics of open spaces as a trusted service for community and expand our understanding on how mediated public open spaces function, paying attention to stakeholders, local context and different social groups.
C3PLACES aims at increasing the quality of public open spaces (squares, parks, green spaces) as a community’s service, reflecting through ICT the needs of different social groups. Public spaces are critical for cultural identity, as they offer the place for interactions among generations and ethnicities. Even in the digital era, people still need contact with nature and other people to develop different life skills, values and attitudes, to be healthy, satisfied and environmentally responsible. Using ICT and co-creating with users, C3PLACES will also expand our knowledge on meeting emerging citizens’ needs about the future public space.
Project Objectives
C3PLACES aims more specifically at advancing knowledge on the interactions among public spaces - urban design - urban sociology - behaviour research on the one hand and ICT on the other. Our aims are:
To enhance research methodologies into a new context, considering the service function of public spaces for their communities, and to design an interdisciplinary methodological framework (system dynamics models, living labs) to better understand the impact of ICT on improving public spaces’ enjoyment, quality and accessibility > attractiveness of public space;
To explore new dynamics of user’s behaviour and characteristics of public places from social, technological, and urban design perspectives by implementing scientific research in different countries focused on local context and needs of different social groups > responsiveness of public space;
To develop a research methodology backed by co-creation approach and multi stakeholder perspective, to be implemented by announcing call for international and local industrial companies to provide their products for public open spaces that an international interdisciplinary team will investigate, also by establishing a local sustainable structure for co-creation with users > inclusiveness of public space;
To achieve interdisciplinary synergy and intercultural comparison, the research activities will be organized under the same methodological framework, but by moving researchers from project partner countries to different discipline and cultural environment across EU;
To develop a co-creation platform (e.g. MYCYBERPLACE) providing scientifically validated framework for citizens’ interaction in and with public spaces, leveraging on their diversity potential of co-creation. The cooperation framework will also validate impact assessment with fast simulation, evaluation, data aggregation and visualization of ICT applications for public open spaces. The platform will be used as an innovative tool for designing co-creative public open spaces, improving strategies from stakeholders’ perspective and links to social media for broad communication;
To test methodologies and tools (web & mobile apps) for monitoring behaviour, social reporting and interactions with different target groups in public spaces to gain better and systematized information and user-based insights on how to deal with opportunities and/or risks of ICT usage in public spaces. This might lead to an expanded understanding of the open spaces typology;
To generalise the scientific results about behaviour of different user groups in public open spaces and to design scientific based strategies for reasonable application of social value creating technologies and their funding and thus provide the public space service in a more efficient way and more specifically tuned to the local context.