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Author: jensbrandt
LiveMapping
LiveMapping – a work in progress (beta)
The problem with maps in an urban context is that they tend to simplify and fix a city that is complex and always changing.
The screenshots of maps is taken from a workshop, Mapping Urbanity, with students of urban design in Tampere, Finland, February 2016. Link to map
Going to NYC
I am going to NYC and will be there from November 3 to 16.
I have a travel grant from the Danish Art Foundation to go and study civil society organisations working for urban change. Please let me know if you might want to meet up or have suggestions for people to meet or things to see.
Above is the poster for a lecture to be held at Parsons School of Design.
Update September 2015
The last half year has been dominated by the ongoing work with new theoretical foundations and practical methods that focuses on the Urban as Situated and Relational – testing these thoughts in various ways: presentations and workshops, competitions, conferences etc.
One presentation and workshop was organised by IPOP in Ljubljana earlier this year with the title, Urbanizit, that would both test a more active kind of presentation (check the link for a video) and discuss some of the methods and thoughts on how to urbanize the city.
Along with theory and methods a new graphic language is also being developed and tested in the competition: Designing the Urban Commons organised by Theatrum Mundi, an offshoot of the LSE Cities in London. The project – Fun City – is still a quite rough prototype as can be seen on the illustration below.
Update
After a paternal leave we (the group of one) decided to develop the concept of CiTyBee further. So a new website is in the making (and even a new name)
Just to sum up what has happened since last year:
Still working on the mapping tool making it a more porous way of mapping. Right now we work on a flexible way of adding or changing categories to avoid fixing the mapping process too soon.
We have been working with the program Actors of Urban Change as a part of the Robert Bosch Foundation and MitOst in Berlin. As an offshoot to that project we have worked with Živa dvorišča in Maribor, Slovenia, And just recently made a presentation of CiTyBee as a part of an Urban Hackaton.
Mapping tool progress
Our collaboration with Mapcentia is showing results. Take a look on a live map of tweets from Manhatten NYC here. And a map (above) showing the results from the recent local elections in Denmark with twitter feed here.
We are currently having some problems with the maps – we are working on some new and even better maps. In the meantime you can have a look here. It is a map that students of Landscape and Urban design did as their first analysis of Hedehusene.
The links show how the very basic part of the mapping tool “harvest” geotagged tweets and show their #hashtags in different sizes according to how often the same #hashtag occurs.
The link that shows the live situation on Manhattan is “crowdsourced”. The CiTyBee mapping tool is more thought to be “curated” where it shows the stories that have been collected “on the ground” (the 1 : 1 mapping) Based on the “curated” map the crowdsoured map can take off and create an urban dialogue.
See more on our thoughts about mapping here.
Presenting The Greenhouse – Væksthuset – in Hedehusene
Photo Leif Vehl
Slowly going public with out first draft for the Greenhouse or Væksthuset in Danish. The perfect place to do that was at the market day in Hedehusene. Wonderful indian summer, Great music, Good company. Take a look here
CiTyBee Business card
What would be the perfect business card for a “Business” that wants to combine a high tech and hands on approach?
A NGO that seeks to unleash local resources?
Somebody who likes honey – don’t know why?
So you guessed it: a small bottle of honey with a QR code that leads to this page.
The honey is produced by the bees of the beekeeper Svend Grønlund in Hedehusene. If you liked it you can contact him here svend at groenlund.dk
If you want to get in touch with us go to this contact page
City Agency
We are working on setting up a City Agency in Hedehusene collaborating with universities in Copenhagen and engaging local citizens, municipalities, developers, media and businesses. The aim of such an agency is to strengthen the local community using methods that are locally relevant and especially trying to engage those citizens that feel alienated by the traditional consultation processes or local democracy in general.
We are looking into new ways researchers and students get down on to the streets and engage with local people. We are developing the City Agency bringing a mix of qualitative, quantitative and spatial methods into local communities involving both students, researchers, local stakeholders and local media. We want educational institutions to play a role in promoting local stewardship in a way where both the local community and students and researchers benefit.
A City Agency would be part of a emerging network of City Agencies that are mainly based in Architecture Schools in Europe – so far in Sheffield, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, Stockholm
CiTyBee Workshop
We have during the years – also back with Supertanker – developed workshop formats that would give students a hands on experience in a local community while at the same time that community would benefit from the ideas and actions of the students.
Our goal is to develop open ended, interactive skills for the individuation of urban issues. With focus on the active involvement of locals through spatial and visible interactions. The workshop has a flexible format and can be stretched from the intensive 2 weeks that is described in the presentation to a longer period of time.
Read the presentation here
See photos from our last workshop with danish students here
See the movie the students made to present the workshop here
Read the Zine that the students published here
citybee.dk 