This paper introduces the open-source Urban Belonging (UB) toolkit, designed to study place attachments through a combined digital, visual and participatory methodology that foregrounds lived experience. The core of the toolkit is the photovoice UB App, which prompts participants to document urban experiences as digital data by taking pictures of the city, annotating them, and reacting to others’ photos. The toolkit also includes an API interface and a set of scripts for converting data into visualizations and elicitation devices. The paper first describes how the app’s design specifications were co-created in a process that brought in voices from different research fields, planners from Gehl Architects, six marginalized communities, and citizen engagement professionals. Their inputs shaped decisions about what data collection the app makes possible, and how it mitigates issues of privacy and visual and spatial literacy to make the app as inclusive as possible. We document how design criteria were translated into app features, and we demonstrate how this opens new empirical opportunities for community engagement through examples of its use in the Urban Belonging project in Copenhagen. While the focus on photo capture animates participants to document experiences in a personal and situated way, metadata such as location and sentiment invites for quali-quantitative analysis of both macro trends and local contexts of people’s experiences. Further, the granularity of data makes both a demographic and post-demographic analysis possible, providing empirical ground for exploring what people have in common in what they photograph and where they walk. And, by inviting participants to react to others’ photos, the app offers a heterogeneous empirical ground, showing us how people see the city differently. We end the paper by discussing remaining challenges in the tool and provide a short guide for using it.
In dit proefschrift worden de resultaten beschreven van een studie die online wijkplatformen voor thuiswonende ouderen evalueert die werden ontwikkeld op basis van wensen en behoeften van eindgebruikers. Middels deze online wijkplatformen worden ouderen gestimuleerd om maatschappelijk te participeren en wordt gepoogd om in wijken vraag en aanbod van inwoners bij elkaar te brengen. Via deze online platformen kunnen wijkbewoners, zo ook thuiswonende ouderen, verschillende applicaties raadplegen.
In most shopping areas, there are place management partnerships (PMPs) that aim to increase the competitiveness of the area. Collective digital marketing activities, such as the adoption and update of collective websites and social media pages, provide opportunities in this regard. Currently, the extent to which digital marketing activities are being employed varies widely among PMPs. However, studies investigating the factors that influence the uptake of digital marketing activities are lacking. This study applies a resource-based view to fill this gap, using data from an online survey about collective digital marketing activities among 164 official representatives of PMPs in urban shopping areas in the Netherlands. Regression analyses were employed to examine the extent to which the resources of PMPs influence the adoption and update frequency of the two most often used digital marketing channels: websites and social media pages. The results revealed that while the adoption of collective digital marketing channels is strongly influenced by the physical resources that characterize the shopping area itself, the update frequency of these channels is influenced more by the organizational resources of PMPs. In addition, the strategic choice of PMPs to deploy human and financial resources for the benefit of collective digital marketing activities leads to increased use of these activities. This effect is reinforced by the fact that digital marketing skills gained through experience contribute to a higher update frequency of the adopted channels. As such, this study provides empirical evidence on the influence of PMPs shared resources upon their digital marketing activities.
