Cultivating public histories and civic imaginations for places in transition.
My research examines how technological systems, imaginations and protocols reshape place, citizenship and governance practices over time. This work has led the development of a global field of research about platform urbanism, but also the cultivation of new ways to value and make sense of cultural and place-based collections in shaping knowledge practices. My modes of practice incorporate archival listening and oral history, prototyping civic technologies, and creative partnerships with knowledge custodians and public agencies.
My book, published by Palgrave Macmillan: how digital platforms restructure urban life, public services and civic participation, and what alternative platform models look like when designed for public value rather than private extraction.
In recent years growing numbers of fast-growing ‘mini forests’ have been planted around the world using an approach for rapid urban greening known as the ‘Miyawaki method’. Originating in Japan, the Miyawaki method was first developed as a relatively novel ecological engineering approach to the afforestation of industrial and degraded landscapes. However, in recent years escalating climate impacts and loss of biodiversity has inspired a new generation of Miyawaki forest practitioners working globally in diverse ecological contexts.
This article explores a collaboration between The Diversified Project at the University of New South Wales and Sydney-based digital creativity & design group Studio Esem which involved neurodivergent participants in creating digital stories for display in public spaces using STORYBOX, a public space media platform challenging conventional digital out-of-home advertising in urban settings. STORYBOX is a tactical urban intervention offering an inclusive citizen-centred alternative to traditional outdoor media.
Cities today are key sites for the operation of global digital marketplaces. It is on the curbsides and at the intersections of cities where technology companies and digital platforms gain access to valuable urban data to be used in the delivery of data-driven services. In this context, urban data ownership and control have become a central policy arena for smart city governance.
This commentary interrogates what it means for routine urban behaviours to now be replicating themselves computationally. The emergence of autonomous or artificial intelligence points to the powerful role of big data in the city, as increasingly powerful computational models are now capable of replicating and reproducing existing spatial patterns and activities. I discuss these emergent urban systems of learned or trained intelligence as being at once radical and routine.
Today’s digital platforms occupy sites of strategic exchange in the daily lives of cities. Whether in domains like transportation, shopping, accommodation, dating, or simply, public discourse, the value exchanged and traded via platforms today extends beyond basic urban services to include wider ‘data ecosystems’ of users, producers and consumers. In this article I am principally concerned with how platform services institute and govern data ecosystems, and why these are critical to the future of data-driven urban science and sustainability policy.
The influence of global digital platforms today has brought attention to their growing significance as critical infrastructures of urban societies. This paper addresses the different ways that platforms are coming into focus, evidenced by growing literatures on platform capitalism, the platform society, platform surveillance, and platform urbanism.
Roundtable contribution, October 2018.
The urban built environment is underpinned by an increasingly complex digital infrastructure, which is posing a variety of unpredictable and unprecedented challenges for urban governance. The paper discusses how the new “hard” digital infrastructures such as broadband are accompanied by the need to understand the governance of public sector information; and in turn how this relates to the emergence of smart city strategies.
Urban informatics is positioned to offer unique insights into complex urban processes through use of big data and pervasive computing. This paper examines the rise of urban informatics as a field of expert urban knowledge, with a focus on the particular visions and epistemologies of the city embedded within the field. By exploring its emergence over the past decade, and reflecting on connections with previous eras of urban computing, the article explores questions about the kind of city that is occupied, resolved and reformed by urban informatics and associated lab-style data sciences.
Investment in the release of open data has become increasingly central to the implementation of smart city programs by governments around the world. Though originally arising out of a push towards “open government” and the pursuit of more transparent decision-making by public authorities at multiple scales, open data programs have more recently been adopted by municipal governments to support entrepreneurial goals of enhanced competitive positioning and attracting investment.
The twenty-first century is widely recognized as the century of the city, and in this intensive phase of urbanization ICTs are set to play an increasingly central role. Technology-led `smart city growth paradigms are becoming an integral part of the language of urbanization policy, enabling global technology vendors such as IBM, Cisco, HP and Siemens to position their services as core enablers of urban innovation.
Large-scale projections onto urban architecture are an increasingly established form of public art, dazzling audiences and re-narrating the places and structures they are projected onto. This article examines one such projection work, Thinking Spaces, a two-week installation on the campus of the Australian National University in 2013.
The digital city has arrived. The technological revolution that is transforming the way we read, write, jot down notes and talk to each other, the way we pay our bills, make our way to meetings, ca...
This article is interested in how a tuning of the ear toward the auditory qualities of urban life presents new encounters with the historical geographies of the city and its spaces of technological modernity. It identifies the way a heightened appreciation of the auditory domain has helped disclose different ways of conceptually approaching the experience of urbanization and technological modernity during the 20th century.
For many Australians, how we think about the histories of our places, and our connection to them, is in flux. There is a growing depth of understanding of what it means to live on a land stolen from its people, a people who constitute one of the oldest living cultures in the world. Our places may be home, they are places of belonging, and shape who we are: but our places are also deeply troubled by the past, in ways that remain unresolved.
What can be done to renegotiate data power in an era of platform scale? Data reforms enacted by cities such as Barcelona and Toronto, as well as new multi-city data alliances, demonstrate the role of local and municipal governments as key sites for data policy experimentation. This chapter explores some of the policies and programmes used to advance experimental data policies that respond to the extraction of data value by commercial platform business models, and discusses some of the emerging instruments used to advance citizen digital rights and urban data values.
In this chapter, I consider the rise of urban AI through the lens of ambient computing, a form of computing in which monitoring devices are able to learn from, and inform, the conditions of their physical environments. I discuss the challenges to public spaces emerging from the rise of ambient computing, which enable private data ecosystems to become more closely integrated within the management of urban public spaces. Here, I am interested specifically in addressing how these developments implicate the ‘life between buildings,’ the civic spaces and the public realm of cities.
This book explores in theory and practice how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with and alters the city. Drawing upon a range of urban disciplines and case studies, the chapters reveal the multitude of repercussions that AI is having on urban society, urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban planning and urban sustainability.Contributors also examine how the city, far from being a passive recipient of new technologies, is influencing and reframing AI through subtle processes of co-constitution.
This chapter reflects on how Uber makes manifest conditions of “platform intermediation”, as the positive externalities that result from the translation of non-digital relationalities into data points are used to continuously modulate and expand platform reach. As a technology platform, like other major technology platforms, Uber enfolds many historical innovations achieved through open source technologies within an Uber-intermediated “platform ecosystem”. The chapter explores some of the key concepts of platform intermediation, and how these apply to Uber.
This chapter explores the historical role of visualization technologies in unleashing a wave of re-thinking about the appropriate form and nature of the city, and the urban conflicts resulting from the imposition of “views from above” by architects, planners and city governments alike. Returning to a series of key historical scenes underscores how new representational techniques afforded by new media technologies have been integral to the arts of urban reform, helping not only to document but also to reconstruct the city through time, providing guiding imaginaries of idealized urban futures.
This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe.
This chapter traces a short profile of Parramatta within the regional and metropolitan strategies of the Greater Sydney area. It highlights how Parramatta evolved from being a suburban centre in Western Sydney – an area traditionally associated with economic marginality, low employment opportunities and lack of public services such as transport and education facilities – to becoming one of the fastest-growing metropolitan centres in the country. The chapter analyses the Smart City Masterplan and other technology-driven initiatives that Parramatta undertook between 2010 and 2016.
The identity of suburbia, so far as it can be ascribed one, is shifting and insecure, a borderline and liminal space. Dominant stereotypes have listed it as ‘on the margins’ beyond edges of cultural sophistication and tradition’ and the areas that make up ‘sprawl’. But in the twenty-first century this static view has to be modified. As is evident from this collection, suburban dwellers themselves have redefined themselves. This collection explores the range and complexity of twenty-first century responses to city suburbs, predominantly in Sydney.
A data civics program siting STORYBOX portals across RMIT's City North Social Innovation Precinct, starting from shared storytelling to ask what kinds of data and indicators emerge from a more creative, speculative approach to precincts with purpose.
RMIT research fellowship on culture-based regeneration, studying urban transformation sites through ecological regeneration and decolonisation, including evaluation frameworks for Miyawaki forest programs linking ecological and social custodianship.
Research partnership on data governance and connected city infrastructure, funded by Urban Growth NSW and delivered with UNSW and the University of Wollongong.
Commissioned heritage research for the City of Parramatta, co-authored with Phillip Mar, exploring the movements and patterns of migration that have shaped Parramatta through time.
Developed the indicator design framework and delivery roadmap for the Greater Sydney Commission Digital Dashboard, monitoring implementation of the Plan for Growing Sydney (2018–2023), the NSW Government's metropolitan planning framework. Delivered in partnership with CSIRO Data61 and Deloitte.
Many of the critical decisions shaping data centre infrastructure are being made through fast-track planning pathways that exempt or truncate community consultation and public exhibition, without transparency around environmental impacts. Core to our submission is therefore the need for greater transparency in the planning and approval of data centres across all levels of government, and ongoing monitoring against approved resource impacts to ensure they do not contravene existing sovereign commitments.
A component architecture for digital placemaking through civic AI, learning grounds, communities of practice, place priorities, public engagement and listening devices, set against examples including Miyawaki Forest Makers, Guardians of Earth and STORYBOX Places.
A near-future street scene used to ask what it means to adopt urban AI care-fully, training it to support rather than destroy urban habitats and communities, rather than to accelerate business as usual.
City-scale data governance models as an extension of the open government agenda: rather than only opening machine-readable data, these strategies turn to public-private data-sharing practices, privacy-by-design and open-source technologies, alongside institutional models for data-driven decision-making. Later developed into the Urban Studies article 'Reclaiming data for improved city governance: Barcelona's New Data Deal'.
Research on civic AI governance, tracing the arc from platform urbanism to place-based approaches to AI sovereignty, and asking how Indigenous data sovereignty, embodied knowledge and community participation can reshape AI governance at local, national and international scale.
Postdoctoral research fellowship awarded by the UK-based Urban Studies Foundation, with residencies at NYU's Centre for Urban Science and Progress and UCL's City Leadership Lab, and data governance collaboration with Data61 and state and federal agencies.
Research fellowship at the NFSA's Centre for Archival and Scholarly Research, working with the national audiovisual collection. The archival listening methods developed here carried into the doctoral research and into Sydney Sidetracks.
Real-time city technologies reimagined as connection points to the "real times of space", ambient sound archives used to create mobile listening experiences that reveal contested spatial histories.
A live, openly-maintained map tracking the roll-out of infrastructure for AI sovereignty in Australia, including data centres, rare-earth mines, refineries, and the energy and water they draw. Includes considerations of ownership, approval pathways, and forms of public contestation and alternate sovereignties being asserted around emergent infrastructure. A data release (mapping toolkit) developed as part of the Civic Interplay project, with recursive interventions by the frontier AI lab and hyperscaler Claude Code.
Nothing of that kind here yet.