URBAN INFORMATION MARKET / OPEN SOURCE URBANISM
[w001] workshop facilitated by Dennis Kaspori

Open Source Urbanism - the first part of the workshop - will focus on discussion about interrelation between design/architecture and communication/new media, specifically targeting locative media issues in urban development. Contributing to discussion are Karlis Kalnins, Marc Tutuers, Ben Russell on "soft architecture" - geotagged media, spatial annotations, located/locative media; Jonah Brucker-Cohen on "subvertive mobile communication projects"; and Jo Walsh about "semantic database geography".

The discussion will be followed by Urban Information Market workshop. Concept of this workshop is based on ongoing architecture project "Urban Stock Exchange" by Dennis Kaspori & MAZE corporation in NL (http://sam.suite75.net/). It is a prototype for gathering information on a city (in this case Rotterdam) by people that are interested in urban development (both professional and non-professional). If there is a large enough user-base that information gets pretty accurate on how a certain neighborhood is doing. The project itself is open source but also the idea of gathering information is based on open source principles.

Workshop task in Riga is to think about the next step of developing "urban information market". So after we have gathered the information, what can we do with it? How to process that information again so it becomes useful for new urban policy and planning? Could that information be used as a basis for urban design?

Links:
http://www.suite75.net/blog/mt/suite75/archives/001354.html - Urban Stock Exchange (SAM) project
http://rixc.lv/ram/en/public02.html - A COMMUNISM OF IDEAS, TOWARDS AN OPEN-SOURCE ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE. Text by Dennis Kaspori. Published in NICEPAPER for RAM5: Open Source Media Architecture. RIXC, 2004.