Performative Urban Architecture: place-making in-between architecture and socio-technical systems

The paper explores how performative urban architecture can enhance community-making and public domain using socio-technical systems and digital technologies to constitute an urban reality. Digital medias developed for the web are now increasingly occupying the urban realm as a tool for navigating the physical world e.g. as exemplified by the Google Walk Score and the mobile extension of the Google Maps to the iPhone. At the same time the development in pervasive technologies and situated computing extends the build environment with digital feedback systems that are increasingly embedded and deployed using sensor technologies opening up for new access considerations in architecture as well as the ability for a local environment to act as real-time sources of information and facilities. Starting from the NoRA pavilion for the 10^th International Architecture Biennale in Venice the paper discusses the perspectives of using interactive technologies for performative objects, which are able to register the impulses of urban activity and reproduce the contexts of the city. In this way the performative environment is established as an event setting providing an embodied experience as a ‘quasi-object' that can couple relationships between architecture, humans and society. These performative relationships between digital and physical environments are seen as illustrative of the social production of space by performance and the creative production of identity. The paper reflects on the perspectives of these performative environments to understand how the urban is forged in a manifold of actions and interactions and how performative objects can mediate relationships in changing social constellations.