COST Action

Dynamics of placemaking and digitization in Europe’s cities (CA18204)

This Action investigates how placemaking activities, such as public art, civil urban design, or 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–through citizen’s knowledge, digitization, and placemaking–to diverse ways of interpreting local identities in European cities. Digitization – understood here as the ongoing process of converting any kind of data from an analog into digital format – (Jannidis, Kohle, and Rehbein (2018, 179) is analyzed to understand the ways in which it impacts local urban placemaking processes. Studying urban placemaking and the digital practices of various local communities throughout Europe’s cities, this Action covers:

• The impact of digitization on the common placemaking practices of local urban communities,
• The changing processes used by citizens to produce local knowledge about placemaking, and
• The influence of digitization on the governmentality of local neighborhoods and co-creation of public space by various societal actors.

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

• Zsuzsanna Varga, Action Chair
• Pekka Tuominen, Action Vice Chair
• Kenneth Bone, Science Communication Coordinator
• Sara Silvestre, Science Officer
• Aranzazu Sanchez, Administrative Officer