Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning: Foregrounding lived experience and community voices in studies of cities with participatory and computational visual methods

"Expanding Data Imaginaries in Urban Planning” synthesizes three years of industrial research conducted in the Techno-Anthropology Lab and planning company Gehl Architects. On a methodological level, the project rethinks approaches for studying urban issues through computational and participatory visual methods. Experimenting with social media images, digital photovoice, and collaborative map-making, it takes a broad lens on exploring how citizen-generated visual materials can reconfigure the empirical grounds of urban studies in ways that foreground community voices and situate understanding of urban issues in lived experience.

On an ethnographic level, the project leverages its industrial position as an ethnographic opportunity to study Gehl Architects up close and unpack the ‘data imaginaries’ of the planning practice; fleshing out collectively held narratives, visions and epistemic commitments that contribute to the production and perpetuation of the role of data in urban planning.

Connecting these observations to its empirical experiments, the project proposes that the future trajectory of data-driven urbanism need not be dominated by a monolithic, linear focus on textual and numerical data, and that it is possible to expand data imaginaries and make alternative modes of knowing cities possible through participatory and digital visual methods.