Grassroots Digital-Urbanism: Reshaping urban space and governance in Berlin

• Applicant: Dr. Niloufar Vadiati
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning ; Human Geography
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496825005

In contrast to the tech-corporate model of smart cities, there is an emerging paradigm of urban digitalisation that is coupled with substantial political mediation and agentive capacities for citizens. This paradigm, identified as grassroots digital-urbanism, is being practised among a network of collectives, initiatives and projects within European cities, pursuing technological sovereignty in spatial development, demystifying the ‘black box’ of platform urbanism and aligning technology to the urban-democracy agenda. Studies of how these discursive practices of grassroots digital urbanism are being enacted in different urban contexts and detailed accounts of their impacts on urban space and governance are few in number. This proposal has thus been written to conduct research that can discursively examine the grassroots digital-urbanism and empirically materialise its role in reshaping the production of space and reconfiguration of governance in a field study, which is the city of Berlin.Methodologically, the nature of this research is qualitative. The empirical inquiry begins with the case-study method that selects four collectives (activity areas of infrastructure, public space, local economy and mapping) that contribute to digitalising urban life in the city of Berlin. The empirical data will be collected through participatory observation and semi-structured interviews among both the members of the collectives and the city officials of the ´digital strategy for Berlin´. The findings of the three enquiries of contextual discourses, reshaping urban space and reconfiguration of governance, will be combined to situate the grassroots digital-urbanism in the urban development process of Berlin.The ultimate academic contribution of this endeavour will be a novel urban-geographical debate that brings into conversation two areas of academic domains: digitalisation and grassroots (post-capitalist) urbanism.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position