[ISEA2011] Panel: Mikkel Thelle – Be­tween Past and Fu­ture: col­lab­o­rat­ing in the city space

Panel Statement

Panel: Think BETA: Participative Evolution of Smart Cities

As most eu­ro­pean cities and towns, the dan­ish cap­i­tal Copen­hagen has many dif­fer­ent lay­ers of phys­i­cal build­ings and struc­tures, but also of sto­ries and mean­ing at­tached to the spaces and places of the city. These spaces and their mean­ing is of in­ter­est to many dif­fer­ent po­si­tions: plan­ners, artists, his­to­ri­ans, urban de­vel­op­ers, mu­se­ums, re­searchers etc. The city is today such a com­plex sys­tem that not many peo­ple can re­late to more than their own quar­ter or street, and cer­tainly very few have ac­cess to the sto­ries and mean­ings that per­me­ates the build­ings around them. From the point of view of city au­thor­i­ties, it is hard to get a di­a­logue with the pub­lic about vi­sions for the fu­ture of the city. Through a com­bi­na­tion of a web-based 3D-en­vi­ron­ment and a per­va­sive, mo­bile tech­nol­ogy, the many par­ties in­volved in the city can col­lab­o­rate in a way that vi­sions, his­tory and ex­ist­ing rules will im­preg­nate each other.

  • Mikkel Thelle is PhD fel­low in His­tory and Media Sci­ence and cu­ra­tor at the Na­tional Mu­seum of Den­mark. He has worked ex­ten­sively with the role of dig­i­tal media in mu­seum frame­works. As a his­to­rian, he is work­ing in the field of urban cul­tural his­tory, study­ing among other things the net­works of the mod­ern city.

Full text (PDF) p. 2356-2358