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Rethinking online hyperlocal urbanisms and creativity

Mark BahnischCreative Industries Faculty, QUT

Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development

16 April 2009

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Contexts of the research

• Smart Services CRC – Social Media work package 04 – drivers of social media and user generated content– Bruns, A. & Bahnisch, M. (2009) Social Media Report 1: State

of the Art

• Centre for Policy Development, Eidos Institute and Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival– Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation– Bahnisch, Bentley, Carroli, Choi & Westbury (2009,

forthcoming)– Event on 26 May– http://www.brisculture.com

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Online communities and urbanism/s

• Affinity proceeds community (cf Grant 2009)• Conclusions from MyHeimat – community can be

leveraged where locality and place are culturally central

• The obsolescence of the ‘local news’ model in the postmodern city

• Questions of social inclusion, community and place

• So, what is the city?

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What is the city?

• “The city is not an organism” (Marshall 2009: 132)• Digital urbanism/s are more than “augmented physical

spaces” (Aurigi & Di Cindio 2008)• The city is an assemblage of human and non-human,

lived and produced socially as spaces (Lefevre 1991)• The city is an imaginary (Prakash 2008)• Politics, the imaginary and utopia (Bahnisch 2009)• Urbanism is recombinative (Shane 2007)

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The recombinant city, digital culture/s and heterotopias

• Shane (2007)– Armatures, enclaves and heterotopias

• Shaping digital heterotopias– There are no ‘digital natives’ – Co-creating digital literacies (Hartley 2009)– The ‘creative city’ is not singular– Mapping the traces of urban affinities

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Many Brisbanes

http://phenomenologist.deviantart.com/gallery/

– Not “our” Brisbane but many Brisbanes

– The imaginative structure of the city

– Mobilities, affinity and place

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Many Brisbanes – the ‘creatives’

• Lea et al (2009), The Creative Tropical City– http://

www.creative.org.au/linkboard/results.chtml?filename_num=262563

• What are the wellsprings of creativity?

• How do heterotopias, armatures and enclaves intersect?

• What creates affinity?• Creativity beyond the

‘creatives’

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Research questions

• What are the specificities of place in Brisbane?

• How is the city imagined?• How can the imaginative

structure of the city be articulated to online communities, innovatively and inclusively?

• What place for affect in online spaces?

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Questions, comments, feedback

• Thanks!