CA18204 - Dynamics of placemaking and digitization in Europe´s cities (DOPMADE)

This Action will investigate how placemaking activities, like public art, civil urban design, local knowledge production re-shape and reinvent public space, and improve citizens’ involvement in urban planning and urban design. Placemaking implies the multiplication and fragmentation of agents shaping the public realm. The Action aims to empower citizens to contribute with citizen`s knowledge, digitization and placemaking to diverse ways of interpreting local identities in European cities.  The added value of digitization – understood here basically as the ongoing process of converting any kind of data from an analog into a digital format – (Jannidis/Kohle/Rehbein (2018:179) will be analyzed in the ways in which it impacts urban placemaking processes of local communities. Studying urban placemaking and digital practices of various local communities throughout Europe´s cities, this Action will understand and analyze,

• The impact of digitization on the common placemaking practices of urban local communities,
• The changing processes of citizen´s local knowledge production of placemaking,
• The influence of digitization on the governmentality of the local neighborhoods and co-creation of public space by various societal actors. 

Drawing on recent theoretical insights that point to the importance of placemaking, widening citizen´s knowledge and wider application of digitization and digital communication, the Action seeks to develop new methods for studying and comparing effects of disseminating local urban knowledge beyond cultural and societal borders. By doing so, it develops European urban research both theoretically and methodologically  finding ways of channeling the results into the wider urban planning and governance processes.