What role does the citizen play in shaping a city's identity today?
Living Shenzhen's purpose is to provide an innovative tool for urbanscape planning, a method that uses local observation to conceive the authentic identity of a place for the benefit of its community. The project aims to overlay multiple personal perspectives on the planning process to ensure a fitted, well-thought urban environment.
The city will be a social petri dish where life's ritual will diffuse into an innovative representation of the city itself. In this parallel map, the urban reality and the individual/autobiographical perceptive experience dwell in parataxis as in the disjointed dual-vision of Aldo Rossi's La città analoga (1976).
The main component of our proposal is the experimental use of advanced existing technology of eye-tracking.
The research involves multiple participants who shared their daily use of the city and its architecture by wearing a pair of smart glasses to record and capture their vision. Relying on footage from locals and visitors alike, our system provides a new reading method while exploring the city. In addition to quantifying attention and interest, we assume that the analysis of this collected data can also provide information regarding the safety and comfort of the growing city's inhabitants. This approach will permit a top-bottom-top mechanism, enabling an initial professional foundation, following a personal perspective input manifesting into an educated planning output.
Due to the city's rapid development, there are several open questions concerning the management of Shenzhen, particularly concerning the urban planning policies of the urban villages. The research explores how the perception of the city changes for an individual that walks in the edges between two morphologically different parts of the city to explore the transition areas between urban villages and the rest of the city.
Living Shenzhen is a proposal for two outcomes: a method and a map, a dual-faced platform representing Shenzhen, which will be the first city to be analyzed in this way. With the help of this device, we identify what matters to the city's users leading to a breakthrough in the urban planning process.
Living in the city is now transformed into tangible information.
In collaboration with WAR