Rethinking online hyperlocal
urbanisms and creativity
Mark Bahnisch
Creative 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!
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