CHAPTER 5: NET WORK GOVERNANCE POLICY AND PROJECT E XPLORATION
thesis. During the course of research and interviews in the region of Emilia Romagna, a number of strategic principles were identified. • A multiscalar approach eliminates hierarchy; this is because as communication and collaboration expand, actors move to engage in network governance that is coordinated at the regional level but articulated and validated by local level projects. • The Internet serves as an object of discussion and tool to enhance dialogues between local public administrations and regional networks. Innovative dialogues stem from both experimentation with the application of Internet technologies and discussions surrounding strategies for their intervention. Enhanced dialogues redefine cultures of collaboration, mitigating institutional and functional system mismatch through collective problem setting where outcomes are uncertain. • Internet projects act upon agents, individual users that often move beyond and within functioning systems of geographic scale beyond local boundaries. Projects can thus be used to change user perceptions of urban spatial scale and public administration intervention, which in the future can generate new dimensions of legitimacy and identification with regional collaborative action. • Internet infrastructure is spaceless, but can be used to act upon and shape movement within, space. That being said, the Internet is an open-source infrastructure, that unlike previous infrastructures, is shaped by the demands of individuals. WiFi and broadband cabling are demand driven forms that appear where a population chooses to take advantage of the service. The above-mentioned observations in light of interviews and research in Emilia Romagna were then complimented with the theoretical concept of “Mobility Environments”.
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Theoretical insights lead to concept experimentation with interface between changing governments and changing population. The aims of the project specifically focused on and discovered that: • Responding to the needs of the “nomadic” urban spatial users responding to the questions of an urban user such as “where am I?” and “what is around me?”. Multiple user populations require multiple dimensions of connectivity and a provision of multiple, but overlapping forums and dialogues of information exchange. The aim is to provide user populations with information that is demanded rather than information that is suggested by the service host. • Incremental implementation and experimentation with project hardware installation allows for incremental service readjustments and more specifically for a time frame in which user populations can slowly appropriate technologies of information exchange. Demand is grown over time and goes hand and hand with Wifi hardware and online connectivity platform service provision. • E public space should be complimented by public spatial interventions with connectivity policy should also work on the spatial fix of online servicing with symbols that people know and understand. Such strategies communication a policy message by creating a spatial symbol for a shift in service dimension. Experimenting with socio-spatial legibility captures and provides a structural framework for new forms of urban services, with the ultimate aim being the creation of a spatial dimension for online information exchange.
5.12 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS The chapter will close after the summary of the analyses of the previous two chapters, with a brief but cohesive series of policy recommendations based on observational and project experience. Recommendations aim to provide a framework to understand the successful