This theme investigates the impact of pervasive technologies on the spatial environment in urban space, both within and outside buildings. As a theory of society as modified by the spatial environment, we will develop space syntax to respond to novel pervasive modes of communication, transaction and exchange implied by pervasive technologies. This will be achieved in Cityware by means of a continuous process of analysis of empirical data on people's use of and relationship with the urban spatial environment as this is affected by the intervention of pervasive technologies.
We have 5 key objectives:
to develop an understanding of the way that our exemplar city of Bath is currently structured and used by different groups of the population: locals, students and visitors;
to develop a theoretical understanding of urban space as it is augmented by pervasive technologies, and their impact on emergent forms of communication, socialisation and culture;
to investigate the impact of the deployment of a pervasive system on heritage and on local peoples and visitors use of and relationship with physical, social and interaction space;
to extend and develop space syntax theory to represent pervasive technologies so as to inform analyses of privacy and context;
to investigate how to get from the contextual information revealed by analysis of peoples movements and activities in urban space to representations, models and specifications of context that can be used in the engineering of pervasive systems.
This will be achieved by developing representations of the affordances provided by pervasive technologies alongside those mapped by space syntax in architectural space, e.g. accessibility and visibility. The main additions to contextual information made possible by pervasive technologies fall into three categories: personal, social and historical. Acquisition and use of these contextual data will require the development of trusted protocols.
We use a range of methods to generate data including:
(i) empirical observations in the city using both quantitative methods (e.g. space syntax) and qualitative methods (e.g. grounded coding of content deposited in our electronic participative installations);
(ii) spatial analysis (space syntax, axial and visibility graphs) of the urban space in terms of visibility and accessibility;
(iii) social mapping of groups and existing social practices, focusing on the social construction of heritage in the City of Bath and the social experience of the City;
(iv) mapping existing pervasive technologies and ICT services, e.g. wireless hotspots;
(v) agent simulations of interactions between visitors, locals and students, as constrained by the citys spatial structure.
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