I’m excited to announce that I’ll be participating in the upcoming panel discussion titled “Digital Placemaking and Soft City Sensing”, scheduled for 20 May 2025, hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. 🇩🇰 🎓 🔗 👉 event page
Panel focus: “This panel brings together four researchers to explore the potentials and pitfalls in this intersection of digital placemaking and computational methods. Across their empirical case studies they examine how GPS tracking apps shape perceptions of outdoor spaces, how local debates on transport and sustainability unfold across social media, and how digital practices—ranging from fashion discourse to craft beer reviews—both root places in local culture and connect them to global networks.” • Read more.
Image source: University of Aalborg
My topic: Outdoor walking is increasingly mediated by digital tools, from GPS tracking apps to route-sharing platforms. In collaboration with Ordnance Survey, I conducted a study employing computational methods to analyse large-scale walking traces and classify routes based on environmental and behavioural factors. This research highlights how digital placemaking extends beyond urban areas, shaping how people experience, navigate, and imagine outdoor spaces. In this panel, I will explore the specific challenges and opportunities of computational methods in outdoor placemaking. On the one hand, digital traces offer rich empirical data to uncover spatial experiences at scale, identifying patterns in mobility, accessibility, and landscape preferences. On the other, the outdoor context presents unique challenges: data sparsity in remote areas, biases in user-generated content (favouring certain demographics or landscapes), and the need for a qualitative dimension to capture experiential and sensory dimensions of walking. Moreover, data-driven placemaking analyses risk reinforcing dominant narratives of place, potentially obscuring local knowledge and alternative uses of outdoor spaces that remained digitally unrecorded.
Cultural Geo-Analytics Lab 