We reconsider the concept of “the right to the city”, introduced by French philosopher  Henri Lefebvre, in the light of the new information space that ICTs create in contemporary urban environments. Such spaces include the use of global online social networks, locative media, e-participation platforms, online neighbourhood communities and so forth. Unlike the physical urban space that it overlays, this new and rapidly emerging virtual space has practically no capacity constraints. However, it is subject to inequalities in terms of access, representation, participation, and ownership. In this research note—an interdisciplinary collaboration between a computer scientist and an urban planner—we wish to study the role of wireless technology, which enables the easy deployment of local networks operating outside the public Internet, and the role of the free and open source social software, which facilitates the easy development of customized local applications, allowing citizens to shape their emerging hybrid space. We suggest that this sort of do-it-yourself (DIY) networking can be realised according to citizens’ values, objectives and the particularities of the environment, and could ultimately enable them to compete with large ICT corporations such as Google and Facebook for their “right(s) to the hybrid city”. We employ the urban sidewalk metaphor as an application that is subject to hybrid design and can profit significantly from the special characteristics of DIY networks.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for planning and design practice to incorporate self-consciously the hybrid space of the virtual and physical. Cyberspace has now become a commonplace environment for social and public life, and its complex uses are entwined with those of the existential life in the physical environment. Therefore, it is argued, planners must engage in the design of the parallel realities of social and public life in these spaces. This paper proposes to look at them in a rhizome-like spatial formation, and in their future design to apply related planning knowledge on places and communities. Based on observations of online activity, the paper illustrates a method to analyse cyberspace's quality by means of Kevin Lynch's taxonomy of images, and of William H. Whyte's method to evaluate spatial uses. Spatial elements are identified through analogies between the virtual and the physical social environments, in order to derive alternatives for future (hybrid) spatial design.

The information and communication technology (or ICT) revolution adds new possibilities for providing information about places and communities that may be used in planning processes. In this article we introduce the practice of flânerie in the physical and virtual space as a method to produce representative images of contemporary social life. We suggest how planning may be instrumental in shaping a public good alternative in this emerging hybrid social space, where the practice of flânerie can stimulate engagement in deliberative planning practices. Finally, we discuss some of the trade-offs and design choices for eliciting information from citizens about their localities to understand how future development may lead to qualitative changes in community life.

1This workshop aims at stimulating and opening a debate around the capacity of Participatory Design (PD) and other co-design approaches to deliver outcomes and methodologies that can have an impact and value for reuse well beyond the local context in which they were originally developed. This will be achieved by stimulating the submission of position papers by researchers from the PD community and beyond.These papers will be discussed during the workshop in order to identify challenges, obstacles but also potentials for scaling up PD processes and results from the local to the global. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interaction design → Interaction design process and methods → Participatory design

Most of what we know about the work of planning practice is grounded in the observations of outsiders (see, e.g., Fischler 2000). Insider accounts-practitioners telling their own stories-are few and far between. Allan Jacob's Making City Planning Work (1978) and Jonathan Barnett's Urban Design as Public Policy: Practical Methods for Improving Cities (1974) are the best known of this small genre-now extended by the publication (shortly before his death) of David Wallace's Urban Planning/ My Way. The author was a former member of the city and regional planning faculty of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. The book is a personal account of Wallace's forty-odd years as a principal of the internationally acclaimed, Philadelphia-based planning and design firm Wallace Roberts & Todd (previously Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd).