1. TOWARDS THE REALIZATION OF SPACES CAPABLE OF HOSTING AND AUGMENTING POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

The spaces of electronic democracy are organized and function as two parallel networks that coexist in constant interaction: the urban network, which refers to the city and the digital network, which refers to the cyberspace. Groups of people come together and create subsequently multiple combinations of collective activities. The project investigates the possibilities of creating actual generators of political actions by placing EDSs close to sites of existing public flows and perceiving them as the means of physical and digital convergence. The virtual space, as it is expressed and represented in the internet, augments their tactile, physical entity, while physical space supports the digital interaction, by ensuring the interpersonal contact, a necessary factor for meaningful democratic dialogue. Those two spaces, digital and physical, must coexist in order for the EDSs to be accessible by everyone. Obviously spaces where public dialogue takes place, like squares and markets, already exist in the city net. There are also virtual equivalents like chatting groups or forums on the internet. In the first case the information is just an instance expression of personal speculations and in the second the information is lost in the chaos of networked places. Political reactions on the subjects that are discussed are rare and therefore all those social dynamics go into hibernation. In the digital and physical space of the project the information of the dialogues is recorded, published and provided to the public in order to be manipulated and redefined. The “vima ” is transformed into a hyper-space, a spatial hypertext, accessible to anyone. The word “vima ” is generated from the ancient Greek word “βήμα ” for tribune in the ancient market where Athenians could express their political ideas. As “vima ” we understand the singular entity of a digital or physical node of the networks, while their intermediate space of interaction is the actual “space ” of the EDSs