Platformisation, Digital Placemaking and the Public Realm

Date: Tuesday, 15th October 2024

Time: 3:00pm—4:00pm

Location: Chau Chak Wing Museum

Platforms and ‘smart’ technology have infiltrated public and private spaces in once unimaginable and often invisible ways. This session canvasses the extraordinary advances this technology enables – such as inclusive design for more accessible streets and public space – but also the ways in which global corporations such as Airbnb now exacerbate processes of gentrification and exclusion; through to the role of digital platforms and ‘smart tech’ in monitoring and even controlling the public realm through technological surveillance, digital profiling, and geofencing. We ask our panel of experts whether and how spatial planning processes and traditions should engage with the online forces now shaping urban space, and the implications for interactions in the public realm.

Speakers:

Dr Nancy Marshall, Associate Professor of Planning, University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Sandy Burgoyne, Researcher and PhD Candidate, Smart Urbanism Lab, Transport NSW

Dr Luke Hespanhol, Senior Lecturer in Design, Research Partnerships Lead, University of Sydney

Murray Cox, Data Activist Founder, Inside Airbnb; and Executive Director, the Housing Justice Data Lab.

Chair

Dr Sophia Maalsen, Senior Lecturer in Urbanism, University of Sydney

Associate Professor Dr Nancy Marshall MPIA is a senior academic in the Urban Discipline, in The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning School at The University of Sydney. Her research and practice focus on people and place, with a particular concentration on re-imagining smart cities and rural areas, redesigning parks and plazas, and rethinking community engagement. For many years, Nancy has been leading interdisciplinary teams of academics, government experts, and private industry to design and manage smart public spaces [including innovative smart street furniture] with the Internet of Things systems to support social well-being and place governance.

Sandy Burgoyne is an experienced executive in the ICT and Government sector who contributes to new policy approaches for Smart and Sustainable Cities. Her academic research area is adaptive urban governance for smart places with the University of Sydney, and at the same time she leads a team of smart place professionals within the New South Wales Government’s Cities and Active Transport division.  

Dr Luke Hespanhol is a Senior Lecturer in Design at The University of Sydney, Director of the Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts, and a member of the University's Academic Board. Luke holds a PhD in Design, a Graduate Certificate in Education, and a Master in Interaction Design and Electronic Arts at The University of Sydney, a Master in Cross-Disciplinary Art and Design at UNSW, a Bachelor in Computer Science at the University of São Paulo, and a Certificate in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution at Harvard University. Luke's practice investigates the intersection of people, culture, and technology. That includes a range of theoretical and practical angles like Design interventions for and with vulnerable groups. It also includes the mediation of cities and culture through digital technologies, across the fields of media architecture, digital storytelling, social and cross-cultural interactions, placemaking, urban informatics, and smart cities. Luke has advanced discussion on these fields through numerous engagements with government, industry, museums, and academic institutions worldwide. Luke is a Fellow of the Social Impact Hub in Australia. 

Murray Cox is a multidisciplinary Australian-American artist and activist based in Newburgh NY, who uses visual, audio, spatial and data storytelling to explore themes of equity.

Murray is the founder of Inside Airbnb, a data activist project which uses data to help communities organise around the impacts of short-term rentals, and the Executive Director of the Housing Justice Data Lab, which uses data and maps to fight for the right to housing and the right to our cities. Other purpose-led projects Murray has worked on include redlining, gentrification, food sovereignty and building solidarity economies through data, maps, photography, oral histories, video, governance, collaborations, cooperatives and community organising.

Dr Sophia Maalsen is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She is currently researching how the translation of computational logics and technologies is being applied to ‘hack housing' and address issues of housing affordability and innovation, as well as looking at the potential role of technologies in tenant advocacy. Her research is predominantly situated at the intersection of the digital and material across urban spaces and governance, housing, and feminism, with particular interest in the digital mediation and reconfiguration of relationships across these spaces. 

Festival of Public Urbanism 2024

Great cities are defined by the quality of their public realm. From parks to civic architecture, well designed public infrastructure supports and enables the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of urban life. But are these public assets, along with public processes of urban governance and planning, under attack? Over the past fifty years key legacies of the modern urban project – such as publicly funded housing and urban infrastructure; or comprehensive planning for new development – have been eroded by waves of political and economic reform. Faith in market based ‘solutions’ has reduced public planning processes to ‘red tape’ and replaced public investment in rental housing with subsidies for private investors and households. At the same time, digital transformation under ‘platformisation’ has seen private corporations able to evade domestic regulations, disrupting every facet of urban life and governance.

The Festival of Public Urbanism will debate these topics and more. Join us to engage with academics, activists, politicians, industry leaders through our program of panel discussions, walking tours, and podcasts across Sydney and Australia.