Urban Informatics: A New & Potential Public Relations for a City
(城市資訊學：塑造城市公共關係的新契機)

What do you think will happen if ideas such as ‘city’ or ‘placemaking’ with such a long history meet cutting-edge technology?

When you carefully observe the cases of urban regeneration projects or smart city developments, you will notice two distinct patterns at two extreme ends; One bulldozes a neighboring plot of land next to old city-center and constructs a new city in the form you have probably seen before, and the other, so-called the technology-dependent urban design or ‘Smart City’, integrates all different kinds of equipment, systems, and smart devices into the city planning and believes that all problems can be handled with smartphones. Although this second development pattern is called technology-dependent, it still remains at the level of physical connections.

In order to resolve these two problems at extreme ends, we must think about the prospective people who will live in these cities respecting their lifestyles. We also can overcome the limitation of physical proximity via expanding our consideration to virtual proximity such as SNS, etc.

Thinking about the lives of people of the era of the metaverse, I carefully suggest a concept of city or placemaking as a complex system embodying both the physical and virtual aspects. The presentations today will cover topics regarding placemaking but approached from the aspect of urban informatics using big data and network theory. We will discuss the methodologies for analyzing the city environments that integrate virtual aspects resolving the issues that rise from physical limitations. Ultimately, these issues can be addressed by understanding the city as a complex system and creating positive public relations by ensuring that the people living in it have happy experiences.