You beautiful, Curitiba: digital media, identity and citizenship

Abstract

This article deals with design and communication aimed at smart cities. Being a smart city has been a strategy adopted by many cities. Based on information and communication technologies (ICT), they aim to attract investment, increase competitiveness and thus improve the quality of life of its residents and visitors. Therefore, the generation of objects and communication elements made available by municipalities widely, both in physical and digital form, is part of this process. Studies on the role of design in cities have been developed, especially in Europe, with recent repercussions in Brazil. However, little is known about how municipalities appropriated these new technologies to strengthen local identity and to promote citizenship, characterizing them as a smart city. Thus, this study is based on the role of design associated with digital media currently to understand its contribution to self-conscious, independent and attentive citizen behavior. Considering that Curitiba is named a smart city, the study presented here aims to identify the way the city government considers the communication elements associated with its projects. As a method, a field study was conducted taking into account the images posted on Instagram of the same city, supported by studies on the impact of globalization as in Castells (2006), the concepts of non-place (Augé, 1994) and “digital swarm” (Han, 2018). The study demonstrates the importance of the political role of these insertions to the result in acts that helps the construction of citizenship.