Map of Copenhagen

The Urban Belonging Project

What makes you feel that you belong in the city??

Copenhagen Architecture Festival

A lived experience catalogue

Data Feminism

The Project

The Timeline

Project Timeline

Involved Community Partners

LGBT+ Danmark is the national interest organisation in Denmark represeting gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transpeople - with a special focus on working to improve equity and divserity in relation to gender identities and sexual orientation. The organisation was founded in 1948, and constitutes one of the worlds oldest LGBT-organisations.

LGBT+ Danmark

Mino Danmark is an interest organisation working to improve the opportunities of Danish ethnic minorities and their chances of being heard and included in society at large. They do this by growing ethnic communities, building networks, generating knowledge and contributing to the democratic conversation and by seeking influence and engagements that strengthen the position of ethnic minorities in society.

Mino Denmark's mission is to eliminate the misrepresentation and inequality of Danish ethnic minorities to create a society with engaged and equal citizens. 

Mino Danmark

Hugs & Food is a shelter for the city's homeless in Turesensgade 21, in the heart of Copenhagen, specifically targeting the most vulnerable homeless in the city who suffer from mental illnesses, bad physical health, drug misuse and lack of network. The social offer provided consists of free and healthy food as well as professional help from social workers who assist the homeless in dealing with hanlding a range of issues.

Hugs & Food is a part of Vor Frue Kirke – The Copenhagen cathedral's diaconal effort. Behind Hugs & Food is a collective of 7 members, who represent multiple churches in the inner city.

Hugs & Food

SIND

DDL er en anerkendt, stærk menneskerettighedsorganisation, der varetager døves ret til tegnsprog gennem lokal forankring, nationale resultater og international gennemslagskraft. Kernen i Danske Døves Landsforbunds arbejde er døves ret til dansk tegnsprog. Alt hvad DDL laver handler om dansk tegnsprog. Det er DDL’s grundlæggende værdi, at døve i Danmark har ret til at tale og få informationer på deres eget modersmål - dansk tegnsprog. Med fuld adgang til dansk tegnsprog er døve ligestillet med andre mennesker i det danske samfund. Det er en menneskeret.

Danske Døves Landsforbund

Dansk Handicap Forbund 

Involved community partners

Project Team

Anders Koed Madsen

I am interested in the way public spaces feel welcoming to certain groups and not others. I am also interested in the way different forms of urban diversity may potentially counteract each other. This interest comes out of a recent research project where we found places of high political diversity to have very low demographic diversity. If there is no hope for a ‘catch all’ strategy for urban diversity, I want to develop empirical methods to trace and unpack the complex ways in which groups are phenomenologically entangled in urban space

Sofie Thorsen

I am driven by innovating digitally powered visual methods, and experimenting with how they allow planners and scholars to generate more diverse insights about people’s lived experiences in cities; through the eyes of the citizens. I am excited that the project uses these visual methods to flip the script on sometimes extractive and exclusive engagement with a process that is participatory from A to Z. This, I hope, will inform future planning with a new perspective on how to design socially sustainable cities.

Drude Emilie Ehn

I am interested in practices of inclusion and equity in urban planning processes. ‘Urban Belonging’ brings a novel perspective by resituating the framing capacity away from us as researchers/planners and on to the citizens themselves, I hope that we through participatory photography, mapmaking and collaborative analysis will gain a more nuanced picture of the voices that are traditionally underrepresented in city-making  - a picture that will enable us to perform fairer inclusion of different urban populations in the future. Furthermore, I am interested in how the methods used in this project can challenge current architectural practices as well as understandings of place attachment and urban belonging.

Thorben Peter Simonsen

I am interested in the constitutive relations between digital technologies, spaces, and practices, and how we might experiment with empirical methods and concepts in order to better understand their situated entanglements in everyday contexts. In the Urban Belongings project we get to do all this and more! Working analytically with participatory methods and by producing qualitative data through technology-use, I am excited about investigating how different people experience and articulate their attachments to different places, the prospect of how these articulations can challenge existing architectural practices, as well as how they might afford material for developing a stronger relational approach and more differentiated spatial vocabulary to the study of cities and city development.

Kathrine Norsk

I am very interested in incorporating user perspectives in urban planning, and even more importantly, the ones that are outside the norm, which is why I wanted to be a part of the project. I think photography is a powerful communication tool which further interested me in as I think it has the potential to become an even more integrated method in the development of places. I am furthermore interested in researching the spatial awareness of the participants and how participatory practices can potentially change the way they view their city.

Sabine Niederer

What draws me to the project of urban belonging is that it takes emotional and experiential knowledge seriously and seeks ways to incorporate such ways of knowing in the different phases of data collection, interpretation, and visualization, to eventually inform urban planning processes. Urban Belonging tests and combines methods that do not often meet: data-driven research and participatory methods, visual analysis and ‘talking back’ to maps, tracing routes and annotating them with image collections.

Maarten Groen

In my work, data always plays a key role. Whether its data collection using participatory methods, analysis or visualization, there is always data involved. We can capture so much in data, but the context from the expert that collected the data is usually even more important. In the Urban Belonging project all these things come together. How do you capture the feeling of Urban belonging? Just collecting data is not enough, context is needed from those that collected the data to make it richer and make it a learning experience for all parties involved. Something that is easily forgotten in regular data-driven research.

Carlo De Gaetano

I'm fascinated by the different reasons why people feel attracted to or rejected by a place, and by how individual experiences can be visually narrated. How many different pictures of the same street can be taken? My interest comes from landscape photography, in particular from the belief that taking a picture is an act of care that reveals our intimate relationship with 'somewhere'. As an expat myself, I often look for signs of familiarity in my surroundings. I like to discover how people look at the city to feel at home. From an information design perspective, I am also interested in testing methods to use visual data to foster collective reflection, and in exploring ways to facilitate image-driven discussions. In this project I particularly like the perspective that urban planning can be informed by individual feelings.

Federico Di Fresco

I am interested in the everyday experience of people in public spaces and how this relates to their health, the sustainability of the environment, and society. I am driven by the combination of a qualitative and quantitative data approach to strategic and service systems design to inform city makers. This, with a participatory approach, I believe, can contribute to making more socially and environmentally sustainable cities.