Keywords

1 Introduction

Cities around the world have evolved unevenly, under pressure from diverse, critical and emerging industrial societies. Today our cities present a post-industrial reality in a daily life full of uncertainties of liquid and fast characteristics. The adoption of new media embodied in our daily activities materialized information at all times and in all places. According to MacKenzie and Wajcman (apud Sykes 2013, 281), technology as place includes three qualities to be explored: patterns of human activities, sets of objects, and human knowledge. Cities give physics to this technology-place dichotomy and, even with their weaknesses and qualities, allow this reflection from the physical and urban point of view as well as digital and informational. Thus, we chose the city of São Paulo, the largest metropolis in South America, as an urban environment of great complexity and object for explorations of such urban experiences.

Urban computing, embedded, ubiquitous and mobile, transformed our daily life and forms of knowledge. Learning has become a ubiquitous action to everyday life. So, it’s natural to see people engrossed in their particular digital world, the movement of their fingers sliding across the screen of the smartphone, eyes drifting, and the mind migrating from one subject to another researching or reading something on social networks or interacting with people, facts and places. Connected full-time, they navigate through momentary and private environments constantly updated by connections over wireless networks. When they take their eyes off the screen, they emerge from their particular cocoon, witnessing a new daily life. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have broadened the way we understand this environment by continuously generating data across all our activities. Thus, technologies have shaped our destiny and the urban environment is our laboratory of the future.

2 The Research

The research project selected a fragment of the urban territory of the city of São Paulo as an object of study in which the researched elements are being applied through data surveys, constructions of narratives, juxtaposition of flows and infrastructures. This metropolitan territory, the center of the city, was chosen and delimited as a field of experimentation by the recurrence in which public power, organized society and users new demands and proposals for their occupation are launched, bringing the need for different looks for on-site understanding and intervention.

The research seeks to understand the urbanity of the city center of São Paulo. Here the expression Urbanity is understood as the quality of experience of the urban space - private and public - and the availability of services. The idea is to identify experiences and qualify the urban fabric so that we can propose efficient and effective projects for the city. The research began with an understanding of the city’s different construction moments - the past, the present and indications of future transformation - to the reflections for each of these times, applying the surveyed elements through the understanding of the city. This involvement with urban reality will link the theoretical reflections typical of academic research with practical, empirical and applied research in future spatial and projective propositions, both architectural and urban.

The Metacity project, belonging to the UrbeLab group: infrastructures, systems and flows of the city formed by PHD professors Valeria Fialho, Ricardo Silva, Marcelo Suzuki and Nelson Urssi, had as students researchers from the bachelor’s degrees in Design, Architecture and Urbanism, all participants in the Scientific Initiation Program of the Senac University Center. In 2018, the project raised and organized sets of data on the transformations that occurred in this territory assuming the premises: how it was, how it is and how it will be transformed during the actions and proposals undertaken by society. The research is guided by the urban condition of our existence. Its main objective is to reveal and to explain the processes of transformation of the central territory of the city of São Paulo cataloging and organizing data that will subsidize the identification of demands. The region is constantly changing with regard to the forms of urban mobility, real estate, social and cultural relations, in the identification and proposition of other possible forms of human interaction and urban intervention. To do this, we initially used bibliographic databases, data and information from government portals, the mapping of geolocated services applications (geoapps), questionnaires and interviews directed to users in the region. This diversity of research grants required new forms of urban representation and indicated that traditional maps are no longer adequate to observe the city in all complexity.

3 Hypercartographies

Our day-to-day has become denser and more complex by the use of app services we carry on our cell phones. We create and provide data about ourselves and relate it to local information by constructing a multi-level cartography of reading and exploration. Sensing and mapping technologies extend this amount of data and how we conceive the information by profoundly modifying how we communicate and interact with the city. Sensing the urban fabric is an important tool to better understand our world by organizing, visualizing and articulating our daily activities. The city’s fixed and mobile sensors provide for the construction of a much more pluralistic urban environment and as such it is available to develop new ways of using the city.

The urban structures keep all the necessary information so that we can attend to the questions that are presented, they are places of action and reflection of its own original design added to the bigdata generated continuously. Mobile devices make this condition so that people become individual sensors in the urban space and thus provide other looks for where we live. In this urban environment, where geographic and temporal referentials are relativized, space and information construct our urbanity. Through this new cartography, what we call hypercartography, the reading of the urban fabric provides meaningful physical interaction that presents itself as a fragmented and amalgamated space for the flows, full of meaning and information.

The central metropolitan territory was chosen and delimited as a field of experimentation by the recurrence in which are launched, by the public power, organized society and users, new demands and proposals for their occupation that bring the need for different looks for understanding and intervention in the local. The netnographic investigations are the great explorations of the process that add us tools of observation, analysis and reflection in fundamental approaches of projects for the community. The term Netnography (Kozinets 2010) is defined in this research as the field research process of an ethnographic nature within a digital environment. We use the mapping of data from geolocated applications installed on mobile devices - smartphones and tablets - and urban sensors to design information that qualifies the city of São Paulo, its culture and daily use.

Initial surveys of ethnographic, subjective, equipment, and infrastructure data begin to compose the platform. The interpretation of these data is contributing to the identification of existing and changing uses, preferences and habits of the residents of the region. The project has been systematizing the various action scenarios and possible co-creation tools and solutions. The information identified as primordial for the research, showed the city as we experienced it, from the use of urban space by the individualities of its users (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Mapping the urban environment through our daily activities.

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4 Metacity

In the last 20 years, the use of urban technologies has permeated our lives, causing changes in habits and new ways of living. The idea of a city as a place of daily activities permeated by information has altered what we know about the urban nature of our lives. We participate in the process of building a society that values the diversity and multiculturality that each new technology advances to multiple forms of interaction, languages and social structures. If we take advantage of the historical, aesthetic and social experience of the Moderno with the understanding of the contemporary individual and his desires, designers will be prepared to play a fundamental role in the conception of cities.

Social design or human-centered design gives the dimension of needs to a city in search of balance. The design with greater human focus finds in the exploratory, participative and collaborative performance a social projective process. This challenge represents a chance for design to help define opportunities and shape future experiences in cities. An important possibility for us to understand every detail in the formation of committed agents with consistent design processes to solve the complex systems of the contemporary city. The objective is to facilitate decision-making with collective participation and collaboration in urban actions using theoretical tools and urban technologies in the human activities in the city. This challenge represents a chance for design to help define opportunities for action and shape future experiences in cities.

The idea of Metacity incorporates the city as a propositional environment of diversified daily realities, as a space in perpetual process of multiplication and expansion of its layers of meaning. Metacity is the environment of projective and metaprojective explorations that uses as a source the urban life abundant of data and permeated by the information. It is the city whose physicality is increased by the flow of information provided by the intense technological evolution.

Metacity is what we imagine for our cities in the near future. An urban space, continuous and interlaced with information, new materials and projected forms, reflection and design exercise for an urban informational ecosystem, whose object is the space permeated by the data, shared at every moment and political action. It is the opportunity for artists, designers, architects and engineers to imagine a daily life that is enlarged and responsive to the needs of the population. Metacity as our second nature is a complex urban process in full structuring and development. The city with these conditions is an endless environment where places, languages and expressions, fruit of the use of space at different levels and needs. It presents itself as the sum of individual and plural dimensions, a complex experience constantly updated by the use where people interact with space by becoming active, participatory and collaborative agents.

The understanding of the central territory of the city of São Paulo allows for reflection on issues pertaining to the nature of the project and the development of new possibilities for the project and innovation professional in a culturally diverse and complex society. For the next phase of the research, we will use a physical model of the chosen territory in scale 1: 500 for insertion of samples of content in audiovisual format through augmented reality. The information inserted in the platform will be made public and accessible contributing to future researches and propositions of the studied area.