Digital Placemaking & Soft City Sensing 🌆📊

Very happy to be part of this amazing research network led by Prof Anders Koed Madsen of Aalborg University (Denmark)!

Original announcement from Anders (source):

I am really grateful that Independent Research Fund Denmark have awarded me a grant to lead an explorative explorative academic network on: ⚡ ‘Digital Placemaking & Soft City Sensing’ ⚡

The network will be hosted by The Techno-Anthropology Lab and BUILD – Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University. The network takes its departure in the fact that urban placemaking practices are evolving due to the increasing influx of social media, location-based services, and algorithms in people’s life. A few examples:

🗺 Recommendation systems like Google Maps not only guide navigation but also shape city narratives.

👨‍🔧 Citizens use social media to define norms and boundaries of cherished places, with more than half the Danish population using platforms like Facebook for community-building.

📸 Image-based platforms like Instagram and Tik-Tok impact how adolescents imagine and internalize social expectations

🤖 Generative AI is being used by urban publics to manipulate urban representations and imagine urban futures

While new media has historically shaped urban connections, this shift necessitates reevaluating how we understand place and social infrastructure in contemporary cities. Including developing new methods for studying it that crosses the qualitative and the computational.
 
The participants in the network therefore span ethnography, architecture, media studies and computational social science. The following people will meet for a series of online and physical workshops in 2024-2025:
 
From Aalborg University:
Marie Stender (co-PI)
Malene Rudolf Lindberg (Co-PI)
Carina Ren
Sofie Burgos-Thorsen

From University of Michigan
Germaine Halegoua
Matthew Bui
Ellie Abrons

Maja de Neergaard (Roskilde University)
Ate Poorthuis (KU Leuven)
Andrea Ballatore (King’s College London)
Tuuli Toivonen (University of Helsinki)
The network will end by inviting relevant urban stakeholders to a conversation about principles and values for future digital placemaking. The workshop will take place at BLOXHUB in Copenhagen.

Looking very much forward to working on this.