Main Article Content
Abstract
As one of the big cities in Indonesia, Bandung has now made many improvements to the city park facilities and infrastructure. The quality improvement can be seen not only in the physical form of various city spaces but also though the free internet access available for park users. This has an impact on the behavior of park users, which slowly affects the dynamics of park activities as well, especially the emergence of virtual space. The presence of virtual space in the city park provides a variety of positive and negative responses in the way people socialize. This paper aims to examine the phenomenon and impacts, the meaning shift, and the redefinition the social functions of urban parks due to the availability of free internet facilities that give rise to virtual spaces in the parks of Bandung. The data were taken from the Superhero Park, Elderly Park, Fitness Park, and Dago Park using structured interviews and observations of visitor activities as the data collection techniques. It is found that the presence of wifi facilities is viewed positively in terms of information access, but is viewed negatively in regard to the essential functions of urban parks which are originally created as a social space. Therefore, the study concludes that there has been a degradation of functions in the urban park facilities, because the nature of virtual space itself tends to bring humans to get carried away in it and interrupt their activities from the space of reality. City parks have also experienced a shift in meaning, thus creating a build-up of space that creates virtual space into the real world in the form of a park.
Keywords: City Parks, Virtual Spaces, Social, Bandung
Article Details
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
- Articles and all related material published are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.