There have been numerous possible scenarios depicted on the impact of the internet on urban spaces. Considering ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile, wireless connectivity and the acceptance of the Internet as a non-extraordinary part of our everyday lives mean that physical urban space is augmented, and digital in itself. This poses new problems as well as opportunities to those who have to deal with it. This book explores the intersection and articulation of physical and digital environments and the ways they can extend and reshape a spirit of place. It considers this from three main perspectives: the implications for the public sphere and urban public or semi-public spaces; the implications for community regeneration and empowerment; and the dilemmas and challenges which the augmentation of space implies for urbanists. Grounded with international real -life case studies, this is an up-to-date, interdisciplinary and holistic overview of the relationships between cities, communities and high technologies.

Concurrency and distribution have become the dominant paradigm and concern in computer science. Despite the fact that much of the early research in object-oriented programming focused on sequential systems, objects are a natural unit of distribution and concurrency - as elucidated early on by research on the Actor model. Thus, models and theories of concurrency, the oldest one being Petri nets, and their relation to objects are an attractive topic of study.This book presents state-of-the-art results on Petri nets and concurrent object-oriented programming in a coherent and competent way. The 24 thoroughly reviewed and revised papers are organized in three sections. The first consists of long papers, each presenting a detailed approach to integrating Petri nets and object-orientation. Section II includes shorter papers with emphasis on concrete examples to demonstrate the approach. Finally, section III is devoted to papers which significantly build on the Actor model of computation.