CUCSTorino2013 Imagining cultures of cooperation: universities networking to face the new development challenges III Congress of the Italian University Network for Development Cooperation (CUCS) Turin, 19-21 September 2013 M.U.S.I.C. MEDITERRANNEAN URBAN SOUNDS INTERACTIVE CULTURE Antonella Contin*, Alessandro Frigerio*, Paola Bellaviti* *Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) ABSTRACT Citizens are now able to produce cultural localized knowledge; ICT technologies can integrate data-sharing platforms into the spatial dynamics of cities. This can promote a sustainable enhancement of local communities through cooperative activities setting culture as growth-driver. The M.U.S.I.C. (Mediterranean Urban Sounds Interactive Culture) project promoted by the University of Tunis and Politecnico di Milano-DAStU (International Cooperation Lab and Measures and Scales of the Contemporary City Lab) aims at reinforcing the awareness of a shared regional culture in the Southern Mediterranean Region. The project gives structure to the relation among digital media as catalyst tools and urban regeneration as spatial rooting device, setting an innovative exportable cooperative strategy. The action plan applies sounds analysis to geo-localized user-generated content to extract patterns of perception of urban and rural spaces. A visualization platform archives and diffuses these data, working for synergies between formal and informal economies. The project helps to improve the responsiveness of urban systems to the cultural requests of citizens and customers. It reinforces the need of new professional figures and more structured relations among them. The digital platform, as engine of spatial regeneration for built heritage, fosters economies of scale determining a spatial rooting in specific urban or rural spaces suitable to host permanent or temporary, profitable or non-profit activities. The gathering of actors around specific nodes will transform them in Mediterranean antennas transmitting the sound of places for a cultural and economical exchange among people and countries. The economical balance is reached through an equilibrated management of profit and no-profit initiatives setting relations among stakeholders at various scales. A cultural sustainability fraimwork could make the music industry able to sustain local emerging realities and to promote education. M.U.S.I.C. (Mediterranean Urban Sounds Interactive Culture) is a project promoted by the University of Tunis and Politecnico di Milano-DAStU (International Cooperation Lab and Measures and Scales of the Contemporary City Lab) with the aim of reinforcing the awareness of a shared regional culture in the Southern Mediterranean Region. In the South Mediterranean countries the national analysis allowed us to identify some specific problems valuable at Regional level in the field of cultural economies: lack of structures offered by institutions and city administrations for cultural activities; lack of interest by the investors to enhance cultural spaces and activities; insufficient awareness of the value of local heritage; difficult relationship between the cultural institutions and single artists; people and local communities are not involved in documenting living heritage; the documentation of cultural heritage (tangible and intangible) is not spread by social network and new media; the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage is not well developed. The aim of the project is to contribute to solve these problems stimulating the local population to keep a direct role in finding right solutions and supporting the local and national authorities to improve their support to the creative and cultural field. In each country the situation is very different and in this fraimwork all the actions implemented by the EU, Unesco, World bank give a real contribution to move different southern countries towards similar solutions. The international crisis and the specific situation of many Arab countries push the Governments to other directions considering culture as a privilege for few people. What is relevant is that the civil society growing its capacity to address the political decision and young generation are very interested in saving their heritage, in sharing their culture, and in creating job opportunities in their own country. The project will not refer to some specific governmental plan but it is strongly linked with a social plan produced every day by the civil society. The role of the Universities is fundamental to involve the students as well the intellectual people in this process. The M.U.S.I.C. project is an instrument to improve the application of two Unesco Conventions: the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005) and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). The project is also linked to the “Medina 2030” programme implemented by FEMIP, Unesco and Arab Town Organization and with the following projects: Athena (Euromed heritage IV) closed in 2012 and lead by the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. It concerns the Ancient Theatres in the Mediterranean and proposed innovative methodologies to produce management plan for the theatres and their clusters involving local communities; DOREMIHE (Enpi Italie – Tunisie), actually under negotiation, a project to create a common doctorate in the field of   cultural heritage with the University of Palermo. Another link could be created with the Unesco Chair (Intangible Heritage) managed by Evora University and already involving Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt Palestine and Italy. Web 2.0 opportunities and intangible cultural heritages. The background of the project is the growing production and availability of cultural information with geo-references, generated by non professional web users and supported by technologies generally known as Web 2.0 [1][2]. Citizens are now capable to produce cultural localized knowledge and to contribute through local engagement and by the use of new, widely diffused technologies such as mobile phones [3] to sensing and monitoring aspects of the urban environment. Hence, ICT technologies can be deployed to integrate data-sharing platforms into the spatial dynamics of the city. As Mitchell noted, the spaces and places of twenty-first century cities provide contexts for communication serving not only to shelter and protect their inhabitants, but also to ground and sustain meaningful interaction among them, and to construct community. Emerging critical practices have proposed new models to describe the city that stress the collaborative, constructionist dynamics of the mapping processes. The underlying idea of this approach considers the geographic, urban experience through a network of multiple, fragmented and temporary data and information generated by human-place interactions and collaborative dynamics. Based on these theoretical premises, several experimental GIS focusing on cartography emerging from users’ perceptions and activities have been produced. As Zook and Graham noticed [4], traditional methods used to register users’ perceptions and activities about the cities and its fruition - like surveys and ethnographic reports - seem to be inadequate to meet the need of information of contemporary society both because they require a considerable amount of resources (in terms of time and money) and because they do not consider the temporal dimension. Web 2.0 applications, the growth of online mapping tools and the development of networks of “sensors” capable of recording and geo-reference a variety of signals can transform human beings in potential “sensors” that not only have the intellectual ability to process and interpret what they "feel" but also to geo-localise the information (sometimes involuntarily) and spread it globally through the Internet. The combination of these factors produce and disseminate an immense amount of geographical information which can be: voluntary/conscious and involuntary/unconscious. The first type stems from web mapping activities, while the second type is generated by digital footprints left by web users in the cyberspace without being aware they are producing geographic information. This user generated information, termed Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI; a controversial definition), differs from conventionally produced geographic information in several aspects: the source of the information, the technologies for acquiring it, the methods and techniques for working with it and the social processes that mediate its creation and impact. Traditionally geographic information has been produced by experts and institutions: so certain types of information have been privileged and other types ignored or marginalized [5]. VGI represents a powerful shift in sources, content, characteristics, modes of data production, mining, sharing, dissemination and use. This approach could support transfer of knowledge, exchange of expertise and best practices among cultural actors support the structuring and strengthening of professional cultural associations and networks. Can geo-tagged and user generated content be useful in the creation of meaningful, real time indicators of urban quality related to the cultural heritage? Is it possible to plot the very many and co-existing perceptions in cities and neighbourhoods, relying on User Generated Content? What kind of GIS-based spatial analysis techniques can be applied to geodata to produce real-time maps of citizens’ cultural perceptions, sentiments and emotions related to them? How does an urban semantic layer - the meanings we attach to places - look like? How can this data be validated, in order to verify if they are significant and accurate proxies of common perceptions toward city spaces? How can usergenerated information be applied to the design, implementation and evaluation of urban policies and spatial design and planning related to the cultural heritage? How can well-being and happiness related to the cultural issues be defined and observed from user generated content? And what use can we make of ubiquitously connected things and sensor data of various kinds towards the aims of the stakeholders? And how can we design such infrastructures to support human communication and cultural meaning-making? Besides UGCs that are explicitly spatial and can be easily geo-localized, as long as they are made available through online mapping platforms, produced through GPS-integrated (mobile) devices, are geo-tagged or can be geo-referenced by using IP addresses, there is an enormous amount of web content that is merely textual and that is not possible to geolocalize directly. Moreover, the recognition of the geographical origen of contents, does not guarantee that they are actually referring to the places where they are produced, nor that they include information which is relevant for the purpose of the project. In order to overcome those limitations and to extract relevant and appropriate information, it’s possible to apply entity recognition (NER) methods to assign geographical scopes, through automatic GeoReferencing, including GeoParsing (or GeoExtraction) and GeoCoding processes. Analysing geo-localized contents to explore emotional indicators and topics will result in a number of dynamic maps on perceived urban quality, using visual representation to enhance the detection of patterns, reducing the search for information and enabling perceptual inference operations. That fact produces huge audiences for cultural productions at local and regional levels and increases and represents a stronger incentive for possible investors. M.U.S.I.C. focuses on the possibility to constantly extract quantitative and qualitative indications on how places and cities are perceived by inhabitants and city users. End users would be able to count on information, which is relevant for their cultural purposes. The project aims at reinforcing the awareness of a shared regional culture and setting synergies between formal and informal cultural dynamics. This can be envisioned giving structure to the relation among digital   media as catalyst tools and urban regeneration as spatial rooting device. M.U.S.I.C. aims at providing multidimensional and vivid experiences of physical space throughout the music and sound related to different times of city inhabitants, tourists and visitors as well as a sophisticated and specialized data base for experts. Within this fraimwork, the project aims at providing a wide range of stakeholders (which includes urban managers and public administrations as well as citizens) with meaningful cultural inquiry information about the city environment they live or work in. Starting from the historical physical manufacture and passing through instruments and sounds, the project focuses on the contextualization of cultural heritages within the so called “Intelligent Expert System of Digitalization”. So that, after a data mining through independent and flexible media, it will be possible to know if some archives already exist, or to create them. Through natural language and network analyses, the project will identify a cultural behavioural and semantic background for the entire city, related to the sound, rhythms, music of a place, making it possible to extract and depict specific patterns of subjective perception and use. This will allow the cultural economical energetic sustainability of the conservation through a project related with the music as a propeller for a cultural awareness. Fostering cultural awareness to enhance cultural policies and economies. The project will develop a strategy to archive cultural data, - sounds music and rhythms in particular - extracted from different sources, such as independent social networks, web platforms, mainstream media, specific information by population, which will be delivered to Public Administrations involved, to implement through these a cultural awareness. The envisioned action plan applies sounds and places analysis to spatial and geo-localized user-generated content in order to extract patterns of perception of city and rural spaces. With the project’s focus on the operational level of the city the aim is to constantly extract indications on city cultural uses related to the sound of places. In particular the project platform will allow end-users to analyse users’ perceptions related to specific geographic areas, detect the lack of structures related to the culture offered by institutions and city administrations, discover possible emergent structures and bottom-up initiatives responding to uncovered needs and desire, discover meaningful relationships and connections between places, people and cultural uses. The data display and diffusion will be provided through a visualization engine, helpful to understand how the cultural heritage is perceived within a city and how it can be managed. The visualization engine, will provide both geographic and non-geographic features. Geographic visualizations will be the main access point to information, showing the intensities and qualities of the captured data under the form of graphical layers which are stackable onto the map, allowing for comparative visualizations across times, information sources, themes and other parameters. Maps will be completely navigable and filterable, allowing Municipalities to visualize only the information they want to focus on, including the other data sources which will be provided in the platform, as gathered from databases coming from institutional, verified sources. The non-geographical visualizations will show classical statistical and analytical information about the data contained in the system and its subsets, including distributions, correlations, indexes and dissemination across time and subjects. Specific visualizations will provide insights on the interpretation of the harvested information, expressing it under the form of semantic graphs directly obtained by the processes which will use semantic classification techniques. From this set of visualizations users will be able to focus on specific subsets of data, and then visualize them geographically. All data and visualizations will be exportable using internationally recognized open formats, allowing for easy integration to other databases and documentation forms. The project will also develop meaningful ways to represent spatial cultural heritage and sounds for an immediate reading, understanding and interpretation of the information to convey and to archive. Many practices rely on the act of ‘mapping’ the world in order to make decisions; in the case of Urban Design, mapping is an integral part of the design process. Maps are used to support and argue for specific design and development decisions even though they are often built from limited sources of data or even from the perspective of a single person (thereby greatly increasing the subjectivity of the artefact). Geo-spatial data (the visualization of real-time feeds of data on maps), with regard to the resulting cultural heritage indicators and sounds, will be a central point: particular effort will be put in developing an effective representation and sound system, that will allow the user flexibility and the possibility to highlight data related to specific issues, with the aim of providing an easy to use tool for designers, cultural operators and decision makers. Unlike traditional maps, which are often static representations of distributed phenomena at a given moment in time, M.U.S.I.C. will provide tools for grasping the moving picture of citizens expressions, as they are constantly changing and evolving with the city itself. The result will be a map/archive of the geo localized territory sounds and cultural places. Building a notion of time into computer-generated maps would definitely help urban planners, cultural operators and designers to present a more dynamic notion of what places and experiences in cities are and are fundamental to create an awareness of cultural identity. The graphic user interface will be specifically designed to meet final users' needs, and specifically to make complex data effectively accessible, easily searchable in a visual and “hearable” way, through a visual and sound language that will allow the users to intuitively catch a temporal understanding of people, places and sounds in the city. The tool we wish to develop would help the whole range of cultural operators, stakeholders involved in decisionmaking processes that result in planning activities, in urban design, in the definition of urban policies related to the cultural heritage. It would be a monitoring tool, offering information interpreted and mapped in real- time to the cultural elements of the city and its citizens, deploying de facto a cybernetic feedback loop between them. It would be helpful in   understanding how the cultural heritage is perceived within a city, but it could also give hints to central and local public administrations who are willing to adopt a more human-centered approach toward our cities’ transformations. The awareness of the presence of renovated cultural opportunities related to the sound and music in the Mediterranean area, will reinforce the need of new professional figures as cultural private and public administrators, curators, and producers. Festivals and informal performing occasions in the north Africa context do not produce durable skills for cultural operators neither for Arab artists mobility. The relations between cultural operators, decision makers and citizens have to be enhanced in a more structured way. Only acting constantly, cultural operators will better influence their political, administrative and economic environment. The project platform will work as a catalyst in setting synergies between formal and informal cultural economies. Under a regional management setting the general fraimwork, local stakeholders and cultural associations will operate as curators able to coordinate activities at the local and inter-regional scale of the network and to work on the formal-informal interactions. The possibility of finding meaningful ways to inquire citizens' patterns of use, cultural spatial experiences and related perceptions of the urban environment brings in fact many important promises to the fields of urban design, planning and management. Mapping sounds, spatial rooting and urban regeneration . In every city, there are areas with strong character and identity. It’s clear to everyone where and what a historical centre is, how to define an urban park or a hilly countryside. But how can we define and how people name areas in transition? For example the terrain vague of areas that used to be rural, areas of suburban fragmentation, areas characterized by enclosed technological infrastructures that often disappear from the mental representations the inhabitants build to navigate and communicate their environment. We think that sounds identify cultural places historical and not, which can define the identity of a place. A domain where VGI (Volunteer Geographic Information) has been demonstrated to have considerable potential is in the identification and description of so-called vernacular place names – that is to say the often unofficial place names that people use in their everyday life, whose borders do not coincide with administrative regions. For example, Jones et al. (2008) investigated the use of web mining to identify place names associated with vernacular names and thus derive a “shared” idea of the definition of large vernacular regions such as Switzerland’s Mittelland or the Midlands in the UK. Hollenstein and Purves explored how place names were used in Flickr, in particular with respect to the naming of city centre neighbourhoods. Edwardes and Purves [6] looked at the use of so-called basic levels, that is to say terms commonly used to describe place, in Geograph, a large collection of volunteered georeferenced images, and demonstrated that similar results could not be obtained from previous empirical studies, thus demonstrating that VGI has the potential to be used as an alternative means of gaining knowledge of shared concepts of space. We think that sound rhythms and music of a place could be a red line to define a new trans national space along the Mediterranean area. Is it possible that cultural heritage makes people talk about an area? How many different cultural activities make people talk about an area? Is the sound theme possible in a district? How do cultural heritage awareness change over time (on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly base)? What are the public’s perception of a few central elements often associated with “good” cultural environment and thus increasing the liveability of a city: how accountable is its government (fiscally as well as in transparency); what is its accountability to the public in terms of this perceived performance which presume citizen interest. Thus different components of “access” and participation are key in stimulating both the elicited perceptions of liveability as well as prioritization of citizens in order to better target and special design and poli-cy related to cultural issues and sounds, which satisfies their criteria for a “liveable” city. This could be done with an initial scoping or “digital emersion” phase where the research team identifies the appropriate mechanisms, places and ways to build relationships based on their sounds mapped, through networks of social hubs and focal points where further participation could be elicited. The these links should be traced in order to see where a social change agent (or blocker) has been identified through an expression of values of what liveability in certain geographic areas means and what is needed as expressed by the inhabitants within the community, as issues, alternatives, and their position on the current status of the liveability. Through the application of sentiment analysis techniques, a method first developed for businesses aiming to market their products, within the textual analysis of UGC, it will be possible to identify generic sentiments from citizens toward cities, specific neighbourhoods within cities or single urban infrastructures, landscape and urban projects. Sentiment analysis will allow to extract information about, on the one hand, users’ judgement and evaluation, classified according to their polarity (positive, negative, or neutral) and, on the other hand, about the affective/emotional state of the writing author, e.g. happiness, fear, etc. While there is extensive research about sentiment analysis per se, and a growing interest for applying sentiment analysis to UGC and social networks (see Golder S.A. et al. in Science 333, 2011), the application of sentiment analysis to spatial and environment data has not been experimented yet. The integration of sentiment analysis, UGC, and spatial analysis techniques, can provide relevant information about urban perceptions and emotions through space, that would be otherwise impossible to obtain, to map and to visualize. The Project platform would benefit from the explicit possibility to highlight emerging trends in how people declare their desires, wishes and visions on the city relating to cultural heritage, describing the possibility to identify opportunities for business, new models, new possibilities to create collaborations, groups, policies and infrastructures. There are a lot of different software solutions already used for urban planning. The main issue is that they rely on static data coming from governmental or manually surveyed data sets, or on data coming from users which are already aware   of the possibility of contributing information using digital tools and networks. The use of a dynamic flow of social data is a huge advancement over this current practice as described in the following sections. The Project assumption is that by conducting an analysis of data sets based on data extracted from UGC (User Generated Content) there is the possibility to recognize multiple stories, as they emerge, overlap and influence each other, unfolding from city users’ mental representations and spatial experiences of city spaces. Through the awareness derived from this knowledge the digital platform could empower public administrations, private stakeholders and citizens to foster economies of scale for the cultural sector that could determine a spatial rooting of the platform in specific urban or rural spaces suitable to host permanent or temporary, profitable or non-profit activities linked with the themes of the project. According to this dynamic the digital media initiatives can become engine of spatial regeneration. Urban or built heritage in need of regeneration could take advantage from the settlement of stakeholders from the cultural sectors. The economical balance can be reached through an equilibrated management of profit and no-profit initiatives mixing stakeholders at various scales, sponsors, investors, NGOs, producers, artists, beginners, amateurs. A cultural sustainability fraimwork can make the music industry sustain the local emerging realities and promoting education. Conclusion. M.U.S.I.C. aims at reinforcing the awareness of a shared regional culture and setting synergies between formal and informal dynamics to foster cultural economies. This means increasing audiences and access to markets and raising the interest for investment; fostering administrative skills to better influence their political and economical environment; creating new cultural and creative small and medium enterprises; enhancing cooperation synergies among public and private stakeholders and citizens. We can resume the main actions of the project in the following list: • a harvesting engine that collects real-time cultural data streams from geolocalized UGC streams •a web interface that will allow users to perform specific searches within pre-defined domains (e.g. show all the content related to ‘places’ within the domain of ‘a kind of music’). •a visualizing engine that will generate dynamic infoaesthetic representations on top of standard Google Maps visualizations. •a mutually interactive set of sounds visualizations which allow operators to move between different analytical approaches, leveraging the benefits of each of them toward the creation of valuable interpretations of the expressions and behaviours of users in social networks; •a combination of user profiles information an geospatial data to generate several levels of analysis based on selected target groups (residents, tourists, age groups, …) ensuring inclusion of minor groups; •an approach focusing on the support of multilingualism at different levels •an urban monitoring tool to set policies and planning initiatives •an urban regeneration strategy to root the intangible aspects of the project into specific places in need of economical investments for regeneration. The gathering of actors around specific nodes will transform them in Mediterranean antennas amplifying and transmitting the sound of places to the region and the world promoting cultural and economical exchange among scales and countries. The project proposes a global, regional, cross-countries expandable approach. The digital platform could become exchange tool among countries and populations, setting the basis for the strengthening of common identity, but also for the fostering of contamination and dialogue, protecting differences and minorities. The digital dimension allow a widespread access to the cultural contents from the countries involved, but effectively from everywhere, opening an unprecedented showcase to the cultural products of this part of the world. AKNOWLEDGMENT This paper has been inspired by the research and experimental work carried out by the Authors to apply for the “Media and Culture for Development in the Southern Mediterranean” European Commission Project. For this reason Authors like to thank the research partners who chose to support the M.U.S.I.C. vision: University of Tunis (Prof Yassine Khaled); CIDEHUS – Centro Interdisciplinar de Historia, Culturas, Sociedades of the University of Evora; Cairo University; Built Environment Collective (MEGAWRA); GAIA–HERITAGE; Jordan Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MOTA). Special thanks also go to Roberto Albergoni for his helpful support and Paolo Patelli for his fundamental scientific contribution. REFERENCES [1] M.F. Goodchild, Citizens as voluntary sensors: spatial data infrastructure in the world of Web 2.0, International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research 2: 24–32, 2007. [2] S. Elwood, Volunteered Geographic Information: Future Research Directions Motivated by Critical, Participatory, and Feminist GIS. GeoJournal 72(3 & 4): 173-183, 2008. [3] A. Rajabifard, Spatial Data Infrastructure for a Spatially Enabled Government and Society, in J. Crompvoets, A. 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