Places, Spaces, Baggage

Real Places in Virtual Spaces

We can distinguish geometrically defined or indicated areas of space from those areas of space where a structure of social norms gives special meaning to movements and actions. A courtroom, a restaurant, a corridor each have their appropriate norms that distinguish sub-areas and assign behaviors to them. We might call such areas places as opposed to mere areas of space that have no special sign...

Places and Spaces: Adjacency Effects

The word "place" is curiously wide in its application, going beyond strict spatiality. A traditional town is a place, the right half of that field is a place, the vacuum cleaner has its place in the closet, the children's place is upstairs, the woman's place was in the home, the third line on the form is the place for this year's income, and as we grow up we try to find our place within the mes...

A two-stage approach to detect abandoned baggage in public places

Baggage abandoned in public places can pose a serious security threat. In this paper a two-stage approach that works on video sequences captured by a single immovable CCTV camera is presented. At first, foreground objects are segregated from static background objects using brightness and chromaticity distortion parameters estimated in the RGB colour space. The algorithm then locks on to binary ...

Places, Spaces and the Dynamics of Creativity

Creativity is a major driving force in modern economies, on a global scale, but also on a local scale. In other words, cities may benefit from a highly creative environment in order to foster their development. The aim of this contribution is to depict and examine the dynamics of situated creativity by presenting an anatomy of the creative city based on three different layers, namely the underg...

Book Review: Convivial Urban Spaces: Creating Effective Public Places