Connected and sociable places: making the post-digital city

公共场所一向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、图书馆和联合办公空间中，这种社交的承诺往往与现实不符。我们的城市充斥着数字技术，却几乎没有空间进行直接的面对面交流，我们如何才能更好地相互联系？虽然一些餐具制造商执行严格的无wifi政策，并禁止使用小工具，但其他举措，例如棋盘游戏咖啡馆，促进了怀旧的，前数字形式的互动。俄罗斯博主和社会活动家伊万·米廷（Ivan Mitin）更进一步，介绍了一种新形式的公共场所-多功能场所，按分钟向客户收费，并为他们提供免费无线网络，茶点和厨房设施。Ziferblat于2011年在莫斯科成立，是第一家此类企业，并迅速发展成为拥有18家分支机构的全球特许经营企业，其中5家位于英国，并激励了全球数千名其他企业家。虽然媒体很快就将这些空间贴上了“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。作为一个数字原生和不稳定的创意工作者，从事自由职业和远程工作的零工经济，Mitin将Ziferblat设想为Web 2.0的无限社交性，参与精神和开放性的物理体现，或者用他的话说，“真实的生活中的社交媒体”。Ziferblat不仅废除了咖啡馆的社会契约，迫使顾客在需要临时住所或工作场所时购买饮料或餐点，而且还让他们成为自己的咖啡师，厨师和活动组织者。与图书馆或共同工作空间不同，Ziferblat在一个屋檐下混合了不同的活动，这样一群庆祝婴儿洗澡的朋友就可以与几个开发新应用程序的技术人员共享空间，一个有抱负的音乐家弹钢琴，一个城市通勤者在回家的路上停下来休息。但最重要的是，Ziferblat被设计成一个容纳各种在线活动的空间，但同时通过空间设计，主持人的工作和活动计划鼓励陌生人之间的离线互动。拟议的项目，建立和发展我的博士研究Ziferblat，将有助于城市媒体研究的新兴跨学科领域（格雷厄姆2004; Ridell和Zeller 2013; Tosoni和Ridell 2016; Aiello等人。该奖学金，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，真实的和虚拟，离线和在线之间的错综复杂的关系。然而，很少有人尝试重新审视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，将人们从传统的公共场所中带走，并制定出一种新的思考和制造城市的范式。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--一种新的场所营造方法，旨在在Web 2.0和移动的技术的进步与无中介的面对面社交互动的价值之间找到最佳平衡。在这个奖学金的过程中，我将通过绘制世界各地的后数字化倡议，并通过三个新的案例研究扩展我的博士研究，进一步探索这一现象。本项目将概述这些倡议协商物理/数字，真实的/虚拟和在线/离线辩证法的各种方式，并研究后数字文化是如何生产和消费的。

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.