Urban Acupuncture in The Era On Ubiquitous Media

Urban Acupuncture in the era on Ubiquitous Media | Iaconesi | The Journal of Community Informatics
12/1/15 - 17:32
Urban Acupuncture in the Era of Ubiquitous Media: Cases from

Rome and Turin
Salvatore Iaconesi1, Oriana Persico2
1. Professor, ISIA Design Florence, Italy. Email: salvatore.iaconesi@artisopensource.net
2. Professor, ISIA Design Florence, Italy. Email: oriana.persico@gmail.com
INTRODUCTION
When we experience territories, we create stories. We model these stories using mental maps. A mental
map refers to one person's point of view perception of their own world, and is influenced by that
person's culture, background, mood and emotional state, instantaneous goals and objectives. In the
density of cities, this process happens for potentially millions of people at the same time. In his work,
"The Image of the City", Kevin Lynch (1960) described cities as complex time-based media, as
symphonies produced by millions of people at the same time in their polyphonic way of acting, moving,
interpreting, perceiving and transforming the ambient around themselves: a massive, emergent, realtime, dissonant and randomly harmonic work of time-based art with millions of authors that are
changing all the time.
The simultaneous presence of this myriad of mental maps suggests the possibility to compare them, to
measure their intersections and differences. In this, it is possible to adopt extended definitions for
objects such as landmarks (Haken & Portugali, 2003) to refer to any distinguished city elements that
shape our mental maps, thus including urban elements which possess - even temporarily - some
personal, historical, or cultural meaning (Appleyard, 1969; Golledge & Spector, 1978).
In a further step, in the direction of citizen activation, we can also imagine to make the information
and understandings of these mental maps - and their similarities, differences, correlations and flows widely known and usable, through the description of a 'relational ecosystem'. This would come under
the form of a multi-dimensional map (of the perception of the city, along the axes of time, space,
emotions and themes) in which subjects (city dwellers) appear not only in terms of their perceptions (a
dot on the map, for example, would describe a specific element of perception in the urban context,
described in terms of where it is, at what time it is, and expressing emotional themes), but also
according to their interrelations, both subjective (because the expression is meant to be
communicated) and objective (because two or more expressions are related in a certain way).
The theory of Urban Acupuncture has been confronted with similar issues from an interesting
perspective. This process tries to use small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context.
http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1073/1120
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Sites are selected through an aggregate analysis of social, economic, and ecological factors, and
developed through a dialogue between designers and the community. Urban acupuncture produces
small-scale but socially catalytic interventions into the urban fabric (Casagrande & Harrison, 2013).
This strategy views cities as living, breathing organisms and pinpoints areas in need of repair.
Sustainable projects, then, serve as needles that revitalize the whole by healing the parts. By perceiving
the city as a living creature, thoroughly intertwined, "urban acupuncture" promotes communitarian
machinery and sets localized nucleus ? similar to the human body's meridians. Satellite technology,
networks and collective intelligence theories, are all used in this practice to surgically and selectively
intervene in the nodes that have the biggest potential to regenerate. The term was originally coined by
Barcelonan architect and urbanist, Manuel de Sola Morales (1999 and 2004).
In our working hypothesis, this possibility of employing mental maps suggests the reframing of the
concept of 'urban acupuncture' (Casagrande, 2008, 2010), transforming it into a technique which uses
the mental maps of the city - and the information about its relational ecosystem - to enable the
emergence of collaboration and participation patterns in which administrations, citizens and
organizations perform small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context. The sections of
this research note that follows, identify our study objectives and research questions and methodology.
This will be followed by a discussion of our study's interim results and conclusions.
OBJECTIVES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Smartphones and their applications allow us to merge our physical understanding of the world with
the digital one. The two have, in fact, become so interwoven and interconnected as to form a new
physicality, visuality and tactility (de Kerckhove, 1997). Moreover, according to works such as
Mitchell's "City of Bits" (1996), McCullough's "Digital Ground" (2005), Zook's and Graham's
"DigiPlace" (2007) we are constantly immersed in emergent networks of interconnected data,
information and knowledge which is produced by myriad sources and subjects in the course of our
daily lives. This data and information radically shapes the ways in which we have learned to work,
learn, collaborate, relate, consume and perceive our environment.
Situated and ubiquitous information is able to powerfully transform, in real-time, the ways in which we
experience places, objects and services, by providing wide accessibility to people's stories, emotions,
expectations and visions. For example, Casagrande defines the concept of 'time-ecology' (2008) as the
relationship between the human-made structure, nature and the human being. In our proposed
approach, this relationship can be extended to include the infoscape, the data and information
landscape, as it manifests itself onto physical space, through people's expression and the ones of digital
information systems. This extension can include the part of the infoscape which is generated by city
dwellers on digital social networks. In this way we can describe an accessible, usable version of the
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'relational ecosystem' of the city.

In our research process we have used this approach to try to provide answers to the following
questions:
How can we observe, analyze and measure the digital relational ecosystem in a city and how is it
expressed on major digital social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and
Foursquare?
How can we model the ways in which information, knowledge and emotions flow in the urban
digital ecosystem?
How can we make information on the urban digital ecosystem accessible and usable to
administrations, citizens and organizations, to facilitate the emergence of 'urban acupuncture'
practices, in the way in which we have redefined them?
The next section describes the methodology we employed in our two case studies to observe, analyze
and measure the fluid urban digital ecosystem in two Italian cities.
METHODOLOGY
The discussion on the methodology we employ is divided into 3 sections focusing on data harvesting,
data processing; and visualization and open data. Each of these will be discussed respectively below.
Data Harvesting
Data can be harvested from social networks in a number of different ways, each describing both the
qualities and quantities of data that can be obtained, and the constraints which have to be applied to its
usage. For example, regulations are provided by the 'terms of service' documents published by data
providers. While some individuals use the possibilities for public expression on social networks as if
they were in public spaces, the 'terms of service' documents (which are legal contracts) expose
limitations and constraints to their usage which go well beyond the ones enforced in the public
domain: even if the data and information is produced from social network users as a form of their own
expression, their possibility to use it for their own purposes - or even for public good - is somewhat
limited, due to the fact that it represents the major source of revenue for the aforementioned service
providers.
In our case data was extracted from social networks in one of two areas:
using the publicly available APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) offered by major social
networks;
purchasing datasets from the large data dealers that have established agreements with major
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social network operators.

Starting from the latter: it is possible to define time, geographic, textual and other forms of
personalized queries to access the hose, that is, the continuous stream of content that is constantly
produced on social networks and which satisfies the criteria established through a query itself.
In our research we have chosen to operate with the Gnip provider to obtain a dataset which would be
impossible to retrieve in other ways (such as some sets of data from Facebook and LinkedIn). We have
decided to use this possibility geographically, accessing all the data which was generated by users
across relevant locations (inside the case study cities, in our case).
For the other social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare) data was captured using the public
APIs which are made available by each provider. For each provider we have defined geographical
queries which allowed us to capture all relevant data generated in the area of interest. In both cases the
results were delivered through persistent or non-persistent HTTP connections, using JSON or XML
formats.
After the elimination of possible duplicates, the harvested data we gathered was stored in a noSQL
database (MongoDB was used in our case), after being mapped onto a common format. A series of 10
storage spaces were used to store most of the relevant information including the following parameters:
users: user identifications;
content: physical structure of the content, including user attribution, time, geographical position,
source;
users relations: allowing to identify the relations among users including direct (friendship,
follower), slack (retweet, share...), or strong (reply, re-iterated replies across different topics...);
content relations: allowing to identify relations between content in the same social network (a
retweet, a share...) or across networks (from Twitter to Facebook; from Foursquare to Facebook);
user metadata: including all the metadata that is generated for a single user in the processing
stages;
content metadata: including all the metadata that is generated for a single content in the
processing stages;
user relations metadata: all metadata for user relations;
content relations metadata: all metadata for content relations;
user clusters: identifying communities, clusters and identities (same user across multiple social
networks);
content clusters: identifying clusters, topics, emotions and identities (same content across
multiple instances and social networks).
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The next sub-section describes how the digital data we went about gathering was processed.
Data processing
Various different processes were applied to the harvested data, including: identity analysis; geocoding; emotional analysis; topic analysis; network analysis; and clustering. This sub-section further
discusses these processes.
The objective of the identity analysis was to identify the same users across different social networks,
and different instances of the same content inside or across networks. To do this, very simple pattern
matching algorithms were applied on the textual representation of both user profiles and contents (e.g.
matching user names, nicknames, content strings and substrings); and in relation to the recurrence of
patterns (e.g. a certain user on Twitter tweets exactly the same things which are posted on a certain
Facebook profile).
A number of different possibilities exist in trying to attribute a geographical context to User Generated
Content (UGC), including users doing the following:
employing the features offered by social networks for geo-referencing their own messages (either
using the GPS on their smartphone, or by providing additional information);
including in their message information which can lead to finding out a location (from the
context) that they are talking from or about;
none of the two possibilities above, but including an indication of their geographical position
(either current or by default) in their profiles;
none of the above, in which case it is not possible to gather the user's location.
The third case has a low level of reliability. For a number of reasons, users may falsify or misrepresent
their current or "home" location. For example, they may commonly choose their favorite city, or a cool
city, or a totally fictional location. On the popular social network Foursquare our research lab currently
resides in 'Mordor' (taken from Tolkien's "the Lord of the Rings"), which we have placed, using the
standard features offered by the system, a few meters away from our lab. For this reason, in our
research we tend not to use these kinds of location specifications.
The first case is also very easy to deal with: a geographical location (often paired with extensive sets of
meta-data, such as in the case of Facebook and Foursquare) is explicitly provided in the message for
the best-case scenario. From the analysis of the results of our experiments, it turns out that the geolocation features offered by social networks are not commonly used. This varies from service to service,
from region to region, and across contexts.
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From what we have been able to understand, the most location aware social networks are Foursquare
and Instagram, with respectively 92% and 30% of the contents which have a location attached to them.
Then comes Twitter, with 10-15%, according to time and context. Then Facebook for which. if we
exclude the posts related to events (which have a location attached to them), the percentage drops to
about 4%, and comes almost completely from messages generated using the mobile applications. These
results are based on the messages we have collected over time in our experiments (from our earliest
ones in 2010, to the current ones in 2014), and vary significantly across time and context. For example,
many more messages with a location are generated on holidays and during vacation times; and in the
case of special events, such as the riots and revolts in Cairo, Egypt, during 2013. In this last case, for
example, Twitter messages linked to a specified location rises to as much as 18%.
The second case in the list is more complex and interesting. It takes place when users do not use the
platforms' features to include their location in the message, but, rather, mention the location which
they're talking from or about within the text of the message itself. In this respect, it becomes important
to try to determine whether the mention of a geographical location in a message is indicating that the
message was produced in that location, or if it was talking about or referring to it. According to the
service which one wants to implement, these two possibilities may completely change the relevancy of
the message.
We have attempted to formulate a working procedure with which to try and add location information
to these kinds of messages. In particular, we implemented the following procedures:
i. We built databases of 'named places' for the case study cities, including landmarks, street names,
venues, restaurants, bars, shopping centers, and more. This involved drawing upon information
from the following sources:
1. publicly available data sets such as the ones available accompanying public cartography
sets (for example for Italy we have used the named places provided by ISTAT, Italy's
National Statistics Institute);
2. the list of named places contained in the OpenStreetMap databases, for example the ones
described in the references section;
3. the list of named places provided by social networks themselves, which allow using their
APIs to discover the locations in users messages, for example on Facebook or Foursquare;
4. lists of relevant words and phrases, such as event names or landmarks.
ii. We used text representations in various forms for named places in a series of phrase templates.
The purpose was to understand if the user writing the message was in the place, going to the
place, leaving the place, or talking about the place. Templates have currently been generated in
29 different languages, for a total of more than 20000 different templates. For example, the
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template "*going to [named place]*" would identify the action of going, while "*never been in
[named place]*" would identify the action of talking about a place;
iii. For each template we assigned a degree of confidence. The purpose was to evaluate the level of
certainty according to which the sentence could be said to identify the intended information. For
example: "I'm going to [named place]" has a relevance of 1 (100%), while the "[named place]"
taken by itself has a relevance of .2 (20%) as it might be a false match (e.g. a bar with the same
name of a famous landmark);
iv. A threshold was established, if the sum of relevance degrees for templates matched to sentences
was above such threshold the information about content location was kept, otherwise it was
discarded. Currently the threshold for this is set at 90% .
By applying these rules we have been able to increase the percentages of geo-located messages quite
successfully. For example on Twitter, we garnered an increase from the original 15% to around 27%
after using these procedures. This change was judged from a series of sample-based statistics we
produced on the messages that had not been directly geo-coded by the user. To our knowledge, the rest
of the messages were not dealing with a specific location, or were not intended to deal with locational
information.
'Emotional analysis' and 'topic analysis' were performed using natural language processing techniques
and technologies.
We approached the possibility of recognizing emotions by identifying in text the co-occurence of words
or symbols that have explicit meaning. As suggested by Ortony et al. (1997) we must separate the ways
in which we handle words that directly refer to emotional states (e.g. fear, joy) from the ones which
only indirectly reference them, based on the context (e.g.: "killer" can refer to an assassin or to a "killer
application"). Each of these has differing metrics for evaluation.
For analyzing affective meaning, we have used the classification approach found in the WordNet
extension called WordNet Affect. The approach we employed was based on the implementation of a
variation of the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). LSA yields a vector space model that allows for a
homogeneous representation (and hence comparison) of words, word sets, sentences and texts.
According to Berry (1992), each document can be represented in the LSA space by summing up the
normalized LSA vectors of all the terms contained in it. Thus a synset in WordNet (and even all the
words labeled with a particular emotion) can also be represented in this manner. In the LSA space an
emotion can be represented at least in three ways:
i. the vector of the specific word denoting the emotion (e.g. "anger).
ii. the vector representing the synset of the emotion (e.g. {anger, choler, ire}).
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iii. the vector of all the words in the synsets labeled with the emotion.
This procedure is well-documented and used, for example in the manner shown in Strapparava
(2008), which we adopted in our technique. We also adapted the technique found in Berry (1992) to
handle multiple languages by using the meta-data provided by social networks to understand in which
language messages were written (and performing a best-effort analysis on those cases in which the
meta-data seemed to be incorrect due to the high number of non-existing words in a certain language),
and using a mixture of the widely available WordNet translations (along with those produced during
the research for specific cases).
We also tried to address the wide presence of irony, jokes and other forms of literary expression which
are difficult to interpret. To do this, we have followed the suggestions described in Bermingham &
Smeaton (2010) and in Carvalho et al. (2009), with varying results.
We applied the same technique for the classification of the topics discussed online. Instead of
providing words, phrases and sentences intended to describe and characterize emotions, we provided
ones that were suitable for the topics of interest (if any), or reversed the technique using statistical and
differential analysis to derive the recurrence of words, phrases and sentences that could represent the
emergent topics under discussion, after filtering out a blacklist of elements and templates.
These previous stages supported the network and clustering stages. In these procedures all of the
relational metadata were used to construct a multi-layered graph model, denoting relationships
between users, users and content, content and content. From our research on the two case study cities
and related datasets we developed a unique role topology system, defined for user-based relationships,
derived from their layout in the ecosystem. These included the following roles:
influencers: they are able to influence many people; the content they share is not only seen by
many other users, but also becomes an object for discussion and for further propagation, across
different networks and communities;
amplifiers: the content which they share is seen by many other users, and shared across multiple
networks and communities;
hubs: they have many bi-directional connections, but they do not act as either influencers or
amplifiers;
experts: they have many incoming connections and are the object of requests for expertise or
opinion;
bridges: they have one or more sets of connections to different, disjointed clusters
(communities, groups, topic areas), and can act as bridges between them, passing information
back and forth, and creating cross-pollination patterns;
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brokers: they interconnect people and content together; they actively notify other users about
content that might interest them, make introductions, ask opinions from multiple users, creating
spaces for discussion;
simple nodes: all of the other instances.
Through this classification we have tried to create a framework dedicated to gaining better
understanding about the distribution and flows of information, knowledge and emotions in the city.
The purpose is to be able to identify the "pressure points" onto which enact interventions, as
hypothesized in 'urban acupuncture theories'.
A k-means clustering algorithm was applied in multiple dimensions to achieve the definition of such
"pressure points", grouping content and users according to different strategies.
For example, we have focused on establishing parameters which would allow us to understand the
changing boundaries of communities, cultures, emotional approaches to topics and the propagation of
information, knowledge and emotions throughout the urban information ecosystem.
In general, we have set up, through conceptual analysis and software production, a set of tools which
make the whole configuration process and the processing stages (described above) as accessible and
usable as possible, given the time and resources that were available to us. All the software is released as
GNU Public License (GPL), and thus can be freely downloaded and used (Iaconesi, 2013). The next
subsection discusses the importance of data visualization in our research cases.
Visualization and open data

During this stage we produced a series of visualizations and interactive systems to represent the
relational ecosystem of the city, and to create a source of real-time Open Data.
Visualizations were produced to represent the time, space, topic and emotional dimensions. In
addition, a graph visualization was created to highlight the relational aspects of the data. Both
entertaining, interactive and more analytical versions of the visualizations were produced, to obtain
experiences and tools intended for different usage scenarios.
The space/time/topic/emotional visualizations were implemented as geographical maps showing the
data through colors, shapes and surfaces (see discussion below). The relational visualizations used a
3D network representation to represent users and relations, color-coded according to roles, topics and
emotions. In each visualization, filters were applied to highlight specific topics, emotions and subjects.
This also led to the opportunity to implement a "find yourself in the ecosystem" experience, through
which users could locate themselves inside the relational ecosystem of their city, and start its
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exploration from a subjective point of view.

This kind of approach resulted in this being possibly the most effective tool to suggest people's
participation. Citizens were able to find themselves in the ecosystem, visualize information about the
communities which they took part in, and explore the rest of the ecosystem, finding like-minded
people, people who had different opinions, cultures and emotional expressions. Such an approach
facilitated the process of attempting to create collaborative patterns by establishing bridges among
different communities.
This allowed people to easily conceive Urban Acupuncture processes, for example by selecting a certain
topic, locating themselves inside the selected topic, and trying to establish how they could interconnect
with other people interacting with it. Examples included "how do we clean a park together"; or "how do
we create a more secure environment for our neighborhood".
As for the Open Data source, in the current situation, it remains a basic configuration, that will need to
be expanded in the future, By invoking two HTTP addresses (one for users and one for content), one is
able to obtain a list, starting from a certain timestamp, of the relational ecosystem.
The next section presents some of the interim results of our research in Rome and Turin.
INTERIM RESULTS
Experiments and working processes are currently being held in Rome, Turin, Berlin, Malm, Helsinki,
London, Kansas City, San Paulo, Hong Kong and Bangalore, with the support and active participation
of local City Administrations and organizations. In this section we will provide some of the interim
results which we have gathered from two of these experiments.
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Figure 1: Love vs. Turin: the city of Turin as expressed on a digital social network in the
Italian Language.
An early project in Turin and a current one underway in the city of Rome.
Love vs. Turin

In 2011, on the occasion of the 'Piemonte Share Festival', held at the Natural Science Museum of the
Italian Piemonte Region we have launched a first instance of this research path, called Versus
(Iaconesi, 2012), in which we observed the digital life of the city of Turin to search where in the city
people of different cultures expressed emotions of "love" using social networks.
During the timeframe running from August 1st 2011 to October 1st 2011 we harvested more that 3.5
million unique content elements on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn, originally generated
from around 12 thousand unique users (as first originators the total number of users was more than
180,000) in 18 languages (of the 29 that we were monitoring).
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Figure 2: Love vs. Turin: the city of Turin as expressed on a digital social network in the
Arabic Language.
A first mapping visualization of the digital social network revealed a city that was completely different
according to the languages that were taken into account. As the images disclose (Figure 1 and 2), even a
simple comparison in the places in which the social media messages were generated revealed different
ways of living the city, according to which language citizens speak. People familiar with the city of
Turin will not fail to recognize the high presence of messages in Arabic language in the city area around
the Piazza Republica and Porta Palazzo Market, one of the largest multicultural areas of the city. The
analysis performed in Italian showed completely different results. For this particular case, further
inspection showed different movement patterns across the city, as well as differences in the expressed
motives for being in a certain place. Again, in the Porta Palazzo market we were able to find a single
corner of the street which, according to which language was taken into account, was used as a place for
business, for worship, for romantic encounters and for a fight, also depending on context and the time
of day and week in which one was observing the location.
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Figure 3: Love VS Turin: a moment in the visualization of love as expressed in the city
using social networks.
As for the original scope of the work, "love vs. Turin", we produced a visualization which showed the
peaks of love, as identified across the different parts of the city (Figure 3). In terms of 'ubiquitous
acupuncture', a series of live, collaborative experiments, involving research performed through
visualizations, uses of the online tools, field trips across the city, visiting the "emotional landmarks"
and discussions with people about their possible motives for these kinds of expression. The latter type
of experiment was particularly insightful when combined with the practice of direct user engagement.
Users were identified for expressing "love" in different parts of the city with recurring patterns and
modalities, and they were directly contacted and engaged with the planned objective of collaboratively
designing ways in which more love could be easily expressed in those same favorite locations. Thirty
five people were engaged in this way through an organized workshop and a participatory field
experiment. The next sub-section contrasts our work in Turin with that of Rome.
EC(m1): The cultural ecosystem of the City of Rome

In August 2013, with the collaboration of the Cultural Council of the First Municipality of the City of
Rome, we initiated the EC(m1) project, aiming to create the first 'cultural ecosystem' of the city.
This system was built to capture in real time the public activity of citizens and operators using social
networks to express themselves about music, theater, cinema, the arts, publishing, traditions, history
and heritage, sports, tourism and media.
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Our observations started on August 15th 2013, and are currently on-going. Up to the time of writing
more than 3 million content elements have been harvested in 29 languages. Of these languages, 15
have been confirmed as being the most common languages spoken daily across the city.
In our analysis, about seven thousand formal and informal cultural operators have been identified
(4186 informal ones, and 3654 formal ones), promoting and communicating their projects and
initiatives in the City of Rome (event organizers, associations, artists, education operators and more).
About 1.5 millions of user profiles have been identified, including tourists. From these data, a series of
initial results have already been identified, including the following:
Figure 4: EC(m1), the Cultural Ecosystem of the City of Rome: the TechCrunch Italy 2013
event as it is happening, in the northern part of the city.
Abundance of operators with weak interconnections and a wide presence of outsiders.
The more than 7000 operators which have currently been identified are joined by a vast
number of smaller operators, artists and various other different profiles (from food
bloggers, to writers, to designers and makers) enacting a rich cultural dialogue;
a few operators are found to be extremely well connected among themselves;
less than 10% of the actors implement more than 50% of the initiatives which are
communicated and which effectively reach their targets on social networks;
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apart from a minimal number of exceptions, operators work alone (about 34%), or with the
collaboration of a maximum of 2 other operators (about 25%);
the vast majority of operators (around 86%) do not perform collaborative and/or
synergistic communication with other operators;
Low interest in discovery: citizens take part in events with a limited number of operators,
the majority of the audiences take part in events promoted by only 1 operator (12%), or 2-5
operators (49%);
results have a large variation according to the cost of the events: in the case of events which
are not free the part of the public that accesses events from 1 single operator increases up
to 62%;
Evidence of niches which act as inter-connectors amongst different communities.
perfectly distinguishable subjects act as bridges among communities, and establish pushpull dynamics among the different communities;
these user profiles are particularly interesting in their ability to traverse audiences and to
create thematic mobility;
Limited, but present, user mobility.
the mobility to reach the events has turned out to be quite limited;
about 20% of the identified users go to 3-5 different neighborhoods to attend events, and
only 3% openly avoid moving from their own neighborhood;
an interesting phenomenon concerns the "univocal destination", with about 30% of the
identified citizens expressing the will to attend events which take place in a single
neighborhood (as it happens for example for the Pigneto, San Lorenzo or Monti districts);
in 4% of these cases, the chosen neighborhood is the one they live in.
Concurrent with our observations, the TechCrunch Italy event was held in Rome, at the MAXXI
Museum of Contemporary Arts, on 26-27 September 2013. This allowed us to take a snapshot of the
cultural ecosystem before, during, and after the event (i.e. 3 days, 5 days and 15 days after the event).
Figure 4 uses the geographical visualization to show the social media eco-system in Rome concurrent
with the TechCrunch Italy. The objective of this type of observation was to gain better visual
understandings about the impacts that such a large event would bring into the city's relational ecosystem.
During the TechCrunch event a large number of social interactions took place (more than 80 thousand
content elements were generated for that event alone), establishing instantaneous relationships. The
scenario radically changed in the days following the event. Of the almost 15 thousand new relations
that were formed during the event, almost none showed any sign of persistence at the 15 days mark. To
describe this using a metaphor, the event was like a "clap of hands", creating excitement during its
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execution, but leaving almost no trace after its end. This trend was also confirmed at the level of
content production. For example, during the 3 days following the event there was a high number of
commentaries which focused around the event and on the topics which were discussed-with crossreferences among users that confirmed the newly created relations. But as early as the 15 days mark,
almost no trace was left of the event in the context of discussions: only about 94 of the newly formed
relationships still showed some mutual interaction, declining even more steeply in the following days.
Basically everyone that attended the TechCrunch event in Rome was part of a series of communities
which remained substantially unchanged as quickly as 15 days after the event.
This observation opened up a set of fundamental questions for the administrations, also based on the
previous experiences and results. For instance, how can an administration, an event organizer, or a
group of citizens create an eco-systemic event? This would be an event that is capable of bringing
change and transformation to the wider society, effectively creating new relations and fostering a
higher level and persistence of citizen participation and engagement. Another question is: how can
such a process be measured, researched through simulations and provoked through direct
interventions so as to leverage the human topography of the ecosystem, using the novel definition of
'urban acupuncture' that we are giving to this process? Or, how can guidelines and best practices be
created to facilitate this opportunity? Our ongoing research has identified the importance of dealing
with the complexity of human relations and with the desire to bring change and new enabling models
in 'urban eco-systems'. To further assess these questions and issues, we have started, with the support
of the Rome city administration, a series of open meetings focused on the 'cultural eco-system'.
Each 'cultural eco-system' meeting starts with a presentation whose objective is to highlight the
possibilities (to include into the discourse the people and organizations which might have not attended
previous meetings), and to introduce the state of the art of the eco-system, bringing into light the
current state of the experiment, our findings, the feedback we received and the changes which we
adopted to take them into account. We then proceed with parallel workshops-some of which are
thematic and vertical (e.g. arts, music, funding opportunities, etc.), and some of which are horizontalto deal more closely with the eco-system. The former meetings are intended to form focus groups in
which people and organizations are able to promote their visions and proposals on each verticalization.
The latter meetings contribute to the creation of what we are explicitly calling the "Eco-systemic
Office", a place (physical or virtual) to which citizens and organizations can refer to position
themselves in the Eco-system, learn how navigate, understand and use it to find collaborations,
resources, participation and the possibility to confront with common issues. Objectives of this office
include re-establishing and enhancing the flows of relations, information, knowledge and participation
across subjects and communities, the public body of the urban ecosystem.
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The final section of the paper discusses some of the conclusions we have devised from our interim
research in Turin and Rome.
CONCLUSIONS
The current outcomes of this series of projects are many and touching-upon a varied set of
fundamental issues. We will now try to answer our initial research questions, and discuss six synoptic
conclusions that we have derived from our interim research in Rome and Turin below.
As we have seen from the large number, variety and ubiquity of the content that we have collected, it is
possible to approximate the relational eco-system in a city by using people's expressions on social
networks, and to observe, analyze and measure this, with a few precautions and context-dependent
considerations. Our main concern, in this sense, is with the presence of multiple types of divides:
cultural, technological, educational. Social networks host only part of the population: young people are
more represented; people from different neighborhoods, backgrounds, cultures, jobs etc. use them in
different ways; people use them for various reasons and contexts. The reasons are many, and their
description is beyond the scope of this note. It is important, here, to highlight how it must be clear the
way in which these analyses take into account a part of the city, not its entirety. This, in our case, has
also transformed into an opportunity, as we have been able to collaborate with cities, using datasets
such as census and other statistics and demographics in their possession, to understand the
consistency and variety of what is not represented in the relational ecosystem expressed on social
networks.
One example among many concerns the wide variety of Asian communities, from Chinese, to
Bengalese and others. With the administration, we have observed the social networking messages in
their languages, and used them to describe their 'part' of the relational eco-system of the city. Then we
compared this with the demographics and statistics (immigration, census) in the administration's
possession, to understand what was missing (22% of the immigrant population from Asian countries
did not seem to use social networks), and their interconnections with the rest of the eco-system (for
example, a remarkable finding was confirmed on the role of 2nd generation immigrant children and
young adults, who were revealed to be the most influential bridges and brokers, as defined in the
previous sections, between the different ecosystems). In the end, this kind of issue is both a problem
and an opportunity.
Given the answer to the first question, it has proven to be fairly simple to give an answer to the second:
having taken notice of the limitations (and opportunities) of this approach, it is in practice
straightforward to capture and model the ways in which information, knowledge and emotions (for
example on specific issues, topics or news) flow among the communities: within them and across them.
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The data is accessible and can be aggregated, compared, weighted, measured, modeled in networks
and graphs, simulated and, in general, used to gain better understandings of the communication in
cities, within and across communities, and in its continuous transformation.
The third question has been, to all effect, answered through practice: Open Data and accessible
information visualizations have been made available and usable to administrations, citizens,
organizations and associations, and has been used, for example in Rome, by hundreds of people to
shape the way in which they collaborate with their administration, their fellow citizens, their
audiences, communities, thematic groups and more.
A few considerations on the modalities according to which this data and visualizations has been made
available can be found below, in the six synoptic conclusions which will form the end of this note.
First of all is the shifting definition of public and private spaces in the 'information era', and the
impacts of this transformation on our perception, on the possibility to effectively use (perceived) public
spaces, and on fundamental rights. As stated in the previous sections, citizens perceive the digital
spaces of social networks as potentially public spaces, in which to express their emotions, visions,
desires, and often establishing profound, engaging, wide conversations about the (near) future of our
cities and lives as citizens. It is for this reason that the need to define more advanced regulations for
the fair, open, transparent usage of these spaces (and of the public information which they contain)
should be among the priorities of governments and administrations. This also involves taking care of
the necessary educational and regulatory initiatives to foster a growing degree of literacy which is
needed to help and support citizens to protect their basic rights to privacy, and their freedom of
expression and information.
Second, a series of technical and technological issues have also been identified for further
investigation. This includes the need to achieve better, more meaningful strategies for content
classification. While the current setup allows for the potential to achieve an acceptable level of
adaptability (to the emerging trends, for example) and configurability, more tools and techniques are
still needed to allow users of the eco-systems to easily configure their own classifications of interest.
Third, we have also identified digital social network content clustering strategies to be still somewhat
too simple for the objectives we set forth. While they are appropriate for content classification - by
theme and emotional expression -, communities and other forms of user clusters - by language, topic,
geographical area, timeframe, and any recombination of these parameters, they still lack the flexibility
that would enable users of the eco-system to autonomously and accessibly build their own clustering
strategies.
Fourth, one item that needs immediate attention is the Open Data component of the system. A more
18 21
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complete set of functionalities must be quickly implemented to allow other researchers and
practitioners to use them for their own research and other purposes, so that the rate of adoption and
engagement would be able to rise exponentially.
Fifth, new tools, visualizations and report templates will be needed to support further design and
development, in order to allow non-technical users to benefit from an augmented degree of
accessibility and usability, especially in the areas of comparative analysis (such as in the TechCrunch
Italy scenario), or in the execution of simulations.
Sixth, all of the above and more issues will form the next steps of the research. The positive results that
were achieved in studying Rome's events show the opportunity to further develop the renewed
definition of 'urban acupuncture' which we described at the outset of this research note. From the
perspective of finding localized "pressure points" onto which to act to provoke wider results to appear,
we have found the relational-oriented visualizations and tools to be truly effective. By using network
views to understand the flows of information and emotion across communities and territories,
researchers and citizens have been able to autonomously form their own strategies for urban
intervention. Simple questions such as "how can we organize citizens to clean this park?" were asked to
explore new research possibilities for our work.
Our analysis started from observing communities and their relational topographies to understand how
single users that expressed interest in urban decor, for example, could be engaged to obtain high
visibility and emotional response. Relevant community bridges and influencers could be easily
recognized and directly contacted through social networks to form small focus groups that had shown
the potential to engage large number of citizens. Basic communication strategies were collaboratively
designed and, then, the communication was started, bearing substantial levels of user engagement,
which eventually led to activation beyond the digital domain (as the more than 500 participants to the
second event have shown).
More complex questions have also been explored in our research process. For example, the Teatro
Valle - an occupied theater in Rome - is currently working to use the 'human ecosystem' to enact
multiple 'urban acupuncture' processes intended to form the venue's next event season. By using the
relational visualizations small, but well interconnected, communities of theater and performing arts
lovers have been engaged to organize the collaborative processes which will lead to the definition of
next season's events. Again: small interventions identified by gaining better understandings of
information, communication and emotional flows in the city, lead to larger, participatory results.
All of these considerations represent, from our point of view, a definite incentive towards expanding
and enhancing this research path.
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Urban Acupuncture in the era on Ubiquitous Media | Iaconesi | The Journal of Community Informatics

Urban Acupuncture in the Era of Ubiquitous Media: Cases from

OBJECTIVES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

'relational ecosystem' of the city.

social network operators.

Visualization and open data

exploration from a subjective point of view.

Love vs. Turin

EC(m1): The cultural ecosystem of the City of Rome

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