Leveraging the use of digital technologies to activate public areas and foster creativity

The capability to design spaces that foster social relations, meeting exchanges, as well as the break-down of social segregation between individuals, has received growing interest from both academic researchers and urban planners, architects, designers, and sociologists. Dealing with the context of the design, development, and management of public spaces creates a new goal of investigation on the relationship between human behavior and physical space mediated by digital technologies. This chapter focuses on how the merge of physical and digital layers of space can enhance new forms of interaction (both serendipitous encounters and/or other types of collaboration) between the urban dwellers and the microcosm they are embedded in it. It aims to present an overview of the impact of the environment and digital technology in these cited forms of people’s aggregation and interactions in order to stimulate innovation, creativity, and the creation of new knowledge. To better introduce a dialogue on this field, scenarios of connecting people and spaces through technology will be presented with a selection of the MIT Senseable City Lab’s research projects. If patterns of social interaction can often appear blurred, the proposed strategy is to comprehend how these overlapping layers (physical, digital, human) can be turned into systems to foster new dynamics of innovation, collaboration for urban public spaces’ future growth.