In Townsend’s view “Cities are indeed an efficient way to organizing activity, since infrastructure can be shared. But efficiency isn’t why we build cities in the first place. It’s more of a convenient side effect of their ability to expedit human contact” (p. 160) In this sense, which are the modalities of participation that can enhance this human contact, and how can techology play a roll within such modalities? and also, does new technologies creates new modalities never seen before, or it reshapes ways of participating from the past?
Jennifer Gabrys characterizes critically three forms of participatory urbanism: problem-solving code, reconfigured solving economies, and participatory sensing. And in this chategories “Urban life is articulated through a series of computational problems that can be solved or enhanced through participatory platforms and programs. [And in which] Citizens achieve participation through using this platforms to perform urban functions, and at a presumaly higher level by writting programs in the first place” (p. 215) But in this sense, in Gabrys’s view, participation seems to be narrowed to a sort of citizen gatherings which only aims to contest with the the city government and private enterprises, which flaws because of it’s incapibility to create sollutions to the same scale and effectivness as those instances. In this sense, should we valorize participation just in terms of effectivness? Is paticipation main concern should be problem-solving?
If new modalities of participation are determined by technologies, how can this technologies be shaped themselves for enhancing participation themselves or to open new ways of communication? should urban participation shifted its focus from the city to the technology that enables certain aspects of it? How can we address less visible aspects of the city through participation? And how can this dialogic values be introduced in both the technology design and urban design?