In the Urban Belonging project, urban planners and humanities scholars work closely together with local community partners in Copenhagen to explore how different people perceive and experience the city as a place of belonging. The project involves the design of an app for tracing and visualizing urban attachments and a methodology for working with this data in participatory settings with the involved participants. Finally, the project ponders how this way of approaching the issue of belonging differs from the gaze of professionals working with it in the context of urban design. The project will end with an exhibition in Copenhagen.
The United Nations has suggested the need for a “data revolution” to address urgent transnational issues such as climate change and inequality. It has endorsed not only improving national statistical data collection, but also opening public sector data up for broader societal re-use, as well as exploring the capacities of emerging forms of digital data, infrastructures and devices in understanding and responding to public problems.
Over the past decade, open data and civic tech initiatives around the world have been set up to promote the re-use of public data for participation and involvement; citizens are gathering their own data on air, soil and biodiversity; and journalists and activists are increasingly using and creating data to support their investigations and campaigns around economic, racial and ecological justice.
What do public data projects do? How do they invite and enable participation and action, and to what end? How can they be studied? How can we critically engage with their histories, social lives and politics? How might studies of these kinds of projects lead to modifications in data practice?
The Field Guide to Public Data Projects explores methods and approaches for finding, following, gathering and comparing different kinds of projects involving public data – from data portals to data communities, sensing practices to mobile apps.
Exploratory research for this project is being developed with support from the King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (KURF) scheme at King’s College London.
Supported by OrganiCity and developed by the Public Data Lab, SaveOurAir is an exploration of the social and political aspects of “smart cities”. Its specificity is the effort to use digital data to stir (rather than settle) urban debate and to nurture (rather than purify) their multiple attachments.
Focussing on air quality, SaveOurAir explored three ways to make urban data more “local” and “politically relevant” and developed three experiments in data activation.
TantLab – Aalborg University Copenhagen
TantLab – Aalborg University Copenhagen
TantLab – Aalborg University Copenhagen
