Video Archive – The Conference by Media Evolution

Liselott Stenfeldt – The Senses of Belonging

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:24:41 GMT

“People don’t change behaviour just because you tell them too. People need innovation in a public space to change”

“Space and life goes together, and it's important to work with them together.”

“Wise cities are making the invisible visible” and the ways we can make it visible means listening and looking at a variety of different data sources. Liselott Stenfeldt is the head of research and development at Gehl, a company which has been playing a leading role in understanding and supporting public places as a platform for community, life and culture to thrive. The main theme in Gehl's approach is to pay attention to complex stories places in the city have to tell us.

Liselott pointed out that it is important to have a diversity of data sources and kinds of data we employ to understand how hot makes our cities more filled with life. It is important to look at traffic data we can get from satellites or sensors but it is also crucial to work with more emotional and subjective data of the people living in a place. Gehl has been developing different methods to incorporate both of these datasets in their work. In this talk Liselott Stenfeldt shows 3 use cases on how the invisible can be made visible by asking people to make pictures of urban spaces and describe their sense of belonging to them or to record the sound of daily life and the emotions connected. This type of data is not really easy to work with, but by combining it with other information it shows a bigger picture. It is even more significant if there is an opportunity to give a voice to people who usually are left out of how public spaces are designed. This provides a unique opportunity in making sure people can meet and spaces are filled with life.

Ling Tan – Why Participate?

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:23:48 GMT

“Work with people who disagree with you and with each other and still work together. This is where participation can begin.“

“Reflection to time and place is important to make people participate.”

How do we get people to participate in creating the cities that they want? And once we do, how do we get them to act towards a common goal? These are some of the questions that Ling Tan works with on a daily basis and addressed in her talk.

In order to create collective action, meaning getting people working towards one common goal, it’s crucial that you are sensitive to what participants will actually get from providing their time. Will their community gain any benefits? If so, which ones? Another key aspect is having participants feel agency and ownership over the issue that they are trying to overcome, and then being a part of the solution. They want to be able to see and understand what results their efforts are yielding, and for that to happen they need to understand the problem. Ling pointed out that there needs to be more sensitivity to what kind of communities we are including and how. For example the climate movement in the UK is not really focusing on addressing different cultures present in the country. In the talk we see an example how the climate conversation can be shifted to by showing the example of the project Low Carbon Chinatown.

To succeed in understanding how people in cities can contribute to creating the future Wise Cities, you need to embrace messiness. Go outside of your comfort zone, and meet people that are different from you, agree to disagree, and work with them anyway. This will broaden your understanding of not only the people who inhabit the city, but the issues that they are interested in solving.

Arnaud Grignard – Tangible Interfaces For Urban Spaces

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 11:23:36 GMT

“The goal is to share knowledge through open-sourced tools, and for people to use them as much as possible”

In his presentation, Arnaud Grignard shared some of the work he does with his team at the City Science group at the MIT Lab, specifically a tool called City Scope. The common thread for all examples was how this tool made it possible to use data visualisation to analyse patterns and potential outcomes when developing cities. By building physical representations of cities, and projecting data onto the city, it’s possible to visualise behaviours on a large scale, such as movements of people and vehicles, and alter them to analyse the effects. One of the shown examples was a project analysing the effects of air-quality on depending on the way people in a city commute, giving a clear visual and physical representation on what it entails to take the car, public transport or bikes.

City planning can be quite abstract and complex and open-source tools like City Scope can help make the abstract more concrete. It can contribute to the democratisation of these types of analytics, and can be used as a way to communicate otherwise often overwhelming and complicated data to new types of shareholders.

But the most important thing that was pointed out, was that since this type of modelling is an open-source tool it’s available for everyone, at any time. These types of tools are available to us, so we should be using them as much as we possibly could in the planning of our cities.

Q&A – Wise Cities

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 17:41:06 GMT

Q&A from the session Wise Cities – Architecting Vibrant Connectivity with Liselott Stenfeldt (Gehl), Ling Tan (Kakilang,Umbrellium), Arnaud Grignard (Université de Lyon / MIT Media Lab).