Connected and sociable places: making the post-digital city

公共场所一直被认为是城市社会和文化生活的中心。然而，在当代的咖啡馆、图书馆和协同工作空间，这种社交承诺往往与现实不符。在我们的城市里，我们如何才能更好地相互联系？我们的城市充满了数字技术，但几乎没有提供任何非中介的面对面接触的空间？虽然一些地图制造商执行严格的无wifi政策，禁止使用电子设备，但其他举措，如棋盘游戏咖啡馆，促进了怀旧的、数字化之前的互动形式。俄罗斯博客作者兼社会活动家伊万·米廷更进一步，他引入了一种新的公共场所形式-多功能场所，按分钟向顾客收费，并为他们提供免费WiFi、茶点和厨房设施。第一家这样的公司Ziferblat于2011年在莫斯科成立，迅速发展成为拥有18家分支机构的全球特许经营权，其中5家位于英国，并激励了世界各地数以千计的其他企业家。尽管媒体很快将这类空间贴上了“按分钟付费咖啡馆”的标签，但Ziferblat背后的想法要雄心勃勃得多。作为一名数字原住民和不稳定的创意工作者，米廷从事着自由职业和远程工作的零工经济，他将Ziferblat设想为Web2.0无限社交、参与式氛围和开放式的物理体现，或者用他的话说，是“现实生活中的社交媒体”。Ziferblat不仅废除了咖啡馆的社会契约，迫使顾客在需要临时在家或工作场所的时候购买饮料或食物，而且还让他们成为自己的咖啡师、厨师和活动组织者。与图书馆或协同工作空间不同，Ziferblat将不同的活动混合在一个屋檐下，这样一群庆祝婴儿送礼会的朋友将与开发新应用程序的几名技术人员、一位有抱负的音乐家弹钢琴，以及一位在回家的路上短暂停留的城市通勤者共享空间。但最重要的是，Ziferblat被设计成一个可以容纳各种在线活动的空间，但同时通过空间设计、东道主的工作和活动计划鼓励陌生人之间的线下互动。拟议的项目以我对Ziferblat的博士研究为基础，将促进城市媒体研究的一个新兴跨学科领域(Graham 2004；Ridell and Zeller 2013；Tosoni and Ridell 2016；Aiello et al.2017年)。这项学术探索媒体技术对城市空间和城市社会生活的影响，越来越关注物理和数字、真实和虚拟、线下和在线之间的错综复杂的关系。然而，几乎没有人试图重温20世纪90年代至21世纪初的过时概念，哀悼或庆祝“虚拟城市”的到来，让人们远离传统的公共场所，并制定出一种新的思维和城市建设范式。借鉴Ziferblat的案例研究，在我的论文中，我创造了“后数字城市”的概念--一种新的定位方法，寻求在Web2.0和移动技术的进步与非中介、面对面社交的价值之间找到最佳平衡。在这次奖学金的过程中，我将通过绘制世界各地的后数字倡议，并通过三个新的案例研究来扩展我的博士研究，进一步探索这一现象。该项目将概述这类倡议谈判实体/数字、真实/虚拟和线上/线下辩证法的各种方式，并审查后数字文化是如何产生和消费的。

Public places have always been known as centres of urban social and cultural life. And yet in contemporary cafes, libraries and coworking spaces, this promise of sociability often fails to match reality. How can we better connect with each other in our cities, permeated with digital technologies but providing little space for unmediated, face-to-face encounter? While some placemakers enforce a strict no-wifi policy and ban the use of gadgets, other initiatives, for instance, board game cafes, promote nostalgic, pre-digital forms of interaction. Russian blogger and social activist Ivan Mitin went even further and introduced a new form of public place -multifunctional venues, charging customers by the minute and providing them with free wifi, refreshments, and access to kitchen facilities. The first establishment of this kind, Ziferblat, founded in 2011 in Moscow, quickly developed into a global franchise with 18 branches, five of which are located in the UK, and inspired thousands of other entrepreneurs around the world. Although media were quick to label such spaces as 'pay-per-minute cafes', the idea behind Ziferblat was much more ambitious. A digital native and precarious creative worker, engaged in the gig economy of freelancing and remote work, Mitin envisioned Ziferblat as a physical embodiment of the unbounded sociability, participatory ethos and open-endedness of Web 2.0, or, as he put it, 'a social media in real life'. Not only did Ziferblat do away with the social contract of the cafe, forcing customers to purchase a drink or meal whenever they need a temporary home-from-home or workspace, but it also let them be their own baristas, cooks and event organisers. Unlike libraries or coworking spaces, Ziferblat mixed different activities under one roof, so that a group of friends celebrating a baby shower would share space with a couple of techies building a new app, an aspiring musician playing the piano, and a city commuter having a pit stop on the way home. But most importantly, Ziferblat was designed as a space that accommodates all sorts of online activities but at the same time encourages offline interactions between strangers through spatial design, the work of hosts, and the programme of events. The proposed project, building on and developing my PhD research on Ziferblat, will contribute to an emerging interdisciplinary field of urban media studies (Graham 2004; Ridell and Zeller 2013; Tosoni and Ridell 2016; Aiello et al. 2017). This scholarship, exploring the impact of media technologies on urban space and social life in the city, becomes increasingly focused on the intricate relationships between the physical and the digital, the real and the virtual, the offline and the online. However, little attempt has been made to revisit the outdated concepts of the 1990s-early 2000s, mourning or celebrating the arrival of the 'virtual city', taking people away from traditional public places, and work out a new paradigm of thinking and making the city. Drawing on the case study of Ziferblat, in my thesis I coined the concept of the 'post-digital city' - a new approach to placemaking that seeks to find the best balance between the advances of Web 2.0 and mobile technologies and the value of unmediated, face-to-face social interaction. Over the course of this fellowship, I will explore this phenomenon further through mapping post-digital initiatives around the world and extending my PhD research with three new case studies. This project will outline the variety of ways in which such initiatives negotiate the physical/digital, real/virtual, and online/offline dialectics and examine how the post-digital culture is produced and consumed.