These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the Cirkana team, formed by Clara Martin Cubero, Alicia Cañellas, Pau Olivella, Sergi Perez Lerin and Bernat Fabregat.

In less than 50 years, the way people are using public places and urban streets has completely changed. For our parents’ generation, the main playground was in the middle of the streets or in the crossroads of big avenues. There, they could play soccer, gymkhanas or hopscotch for hours and only once in a while some motorised vehicles or traditional wagons hindered the gamers. In those days, streets were a core place for social relations and children education.

Later on, cities started a process of transformation. Cars and motorcycles began occupying the streets and public playgrounds were progressively displaced to specific areas such as parks, gardens and sport fields. Simultaneously, the growth of TV, home video-game consoles and PC contributed to increase youngsters’ leisure time confined at home. At the same time, streets and public areas evolved into something less relevant for both youngsters and adults.

With the popularity of the Internet, home leisure time became social and interactive. From multiplayer games to chat rooms, electronic forums, messenger and -nowadays- social networking services; digital networks are increasing interactions between people, giving more value to leisure and helping people to share their activities and interests with others. However, most of these interactions stays in the virtual world and exclude face-to-face activities.

The early expansion of portable devices with build-in GPS and the latest developments of Location Based Services (LBS) create a new range of opportunities.

Steve Rhodes' photo.

- From a business perspective, companies can take advantage of LBS applications for increasing their branding, loyalty or attraction, as we explained in the post “LBS, the perfect lab to create the next killer applications“.
- From a social and leisure perspective, it is indeed a great opportunity to combine the power of online social networks with the real world face-to-face interaction. LBS are transforming static and repetitive leisure habits of people towards a new way of learning and playing closer to their environment.

Taking into account that GPS and LBS will be available to most mobile phone users in the next years, these new leisure, social and business opportunities will also bring new social and urban changes.

In this new context, youngsters have the chance to take the streets and play again wherever they are, like their grandparents did before. It’s time, now, to take our GPS gadgets to start recovering the streets as a renewed urban playground.