About the project

The project focuses on how digital technologies and media enable new ways of designing urban services and positively affect issues of urban liveability, sustainability, design and governance of cities and urban space.

Urban environments are teeming with communication technologies, and data and media are increasingly ubiquitous, flexible and integrated across urban governance, industry and daily practices. Urban digital services combine data, infrastructures and people in ways that serve commercial and/or civic purposes in the city. Moreover, digital systems based on ‘big data’ – the collection and analysis of vast amounts of information – are increasingly used in governance, planning and public service provision as well as in policy and decision making. Thus, the design of digital services is increasingly important for how cities are planned, built and lived in.

Digital technological systems should be understood as infrastructures for everyday networked life, but also for business and city maintenance and operation, and the project seeks to identify new ways of joining together and mobilising interdisciplinary competencies and perspectives across the digital design and urbanism fields. From this position, it studies the political agencies embedded in technological systems that cities increasingly rely on, and the challenges they present, in order to point to the possibility of developing platforms for policies, practices and cultures that facilitate and encourage transparent and accountable digital infrastructures