NET_CITY: A collaborative environment to promote the understanding of the contemporary city

Presentation at the ACSP-AESOP Third Joint Congress. Leuven (Belgium), July 8th-12th, 2003

We have carried out a pedagogic experience, in which citizens and students of architecture -working on a web environment especially designed for this project (http://www.salleurl.edu/illamyrurgia)- collaboratively construct an understanding of the environment they live in. Through the web, any person can submit his or her view of the urban environment by means of a concept, a text and an image. Ad-hoc interfaces for collaborative work allows students to analyze that information, establishing relationships between the data items, and developing lines of argument from them. In this context, the application of information technologies enables us to eliminate existing boundaries (individual, social, cultural, political, disciplinary), and to create new spaces of interaction and communication. We believe that a new vision of the city might emerge from this collaborative analysis; a vision that is conceived and expressed through a new language: the language of the communication and information media.