The Urban Belonging Project

Collaboration with Gehl Architects, AAU, TantLab AAU, Service Design Lab, Public Data Lab

Copenhagen, Denmark

The Urban Belonging Project (www.urbanbelonging.com) What makes you feel that you belong in the city?? To design a more socially sustainable city, we long for more diverse and nuanced insights about how the city works as a space of belonging - not seen from the professional eyes of those who plan it, but from those who live in it. To explore this, the Urban Belonging project was initiated in 2021 by a collective of planners and scholars in Copenhagen with the ambition of mapping lived experiences of under-represented communities in the city. A lived experience catalogue Partnering with local community organisations, the project has invited participants who self-identify as ethnic minorities, deaf, homeless, physically disabled, mentally vulnerable, internationals, and/or LGBT+. Using participatory mapmaking and photography, they have been asked to document their relationship to the city. Over three months, they have gone on 100+ walks in the city, taken 1400+ photos, built 200+ maps, and enriched them together in workshops. The result is a unique catalogue of photos, maps, and data visualizations about Copenhagen that tell individual and collective stories. It qualifies what ‘belonging’ means to different people, charts geospatial patterns in where the city creates positive and negative experiences for different marginalized identities, and crafts an intersectional gaze on the city.

You're invited to the

Urban Belonging Exhibition

"On February 22, 2022 we are proud to present the project at a public exhibition in Copenhagen at Urban 13, Bispeengen 20. The exhibition displays a collection of photos, maps and illustrations that are co-created by the project's participants and researchers in exploration of what belonging means to different people, opening conversation about diversity and blind spots in urban planning.

Everyone is invited, and we hope to see you there!

Doors open at 17.00, and exhibition is open until 20.00 Bring your friend, colleague, or family for a drink at the bar and see how the project participants experience the city through their eyes.

Rethinking Citizen Engagement with Data Feminism

When addressing diversity in urban planning and urban policy, there is a tendency to look at social issues in isolated ways. But our identities are complex, intricate and intewoven. If you are for instance both physical disabled and gay, your urban experience might be a lot different from people who are queer able-bodied, or hetero-disabled people.

To undertand these intersections, we draw inspiration from Data Feminism; the introduction of intersectional feminist theory and critique into how we work with data, which shapes our project in at least two ways: First, we use participatory methods to rethink citizen engagement as a process, redefining who is invited to the conversation, and suggesting alternative, more sensitive ways of engaging underrepresented communities.

Second, we redesign the way that data is used to tell stories about people's urban experiences: To change the narrative, it is not enough to rethink the process of engagement, or how we collect data about people. It is also crucial that we replace the binary red-and-blue gender diagrams, and introduce a more nuanced data visualisation language that captures the intersectional complexity of social issues. To do so, we experiment with making maps and visualisations that break hierarchies, challenge binaries and expose power dynamics that shape feelings of belonging in cities."

by Project Coordinators Sofie Thorsen & Drude Emilie Ehn

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