Blog | Digitalisation

Earlier this year, researchers from subproject C07 on spatial conflicts and the platform economy spent six weeks in Cape Town, South Africa. In this brief Space-Vignette, Simon Pohl and Christina Hecht provide insights into the experiences they gathered – in relation to the project's research questions and beyond.

CRC 1265 researcher Eric Lettkemann unravels the intriguing dynamics between digital technology and public spaces. Uncovering contrasting approaches to the of hybrid reality game Pokémon Go, from cemetery bans in Germany to seamless integration in Tokyo, he discusses the social implications and future challenges of such locative media as we navigate an evolving world where the digital of physical increasingly overlap.

The article describes the basic principles and some key exercises of the five-day participatory workshop that took place in Berlin in November 2022 with a group of young students. The aim of the workshop was to develop a progressive web application together with the young Berliners, which will later be used by the same students to create mental maps, a research method employed to record the routines, paths and experiences of young people in (their) spaces.

In West Africa, an entertainment genre called Afronovela is booming. Like South American telenovelas, they are romantic soap operas, but set in Africa. Especially in Senegal and the Ivory Coast, an industry of its own has emerged. In subproject C06, the French sociologist Séverine Marguin and the Congolese director and film scholar Daddy Dibinga Kalamba investigate how these series stage narrations of successful lives.

This blogpost uses the phenomenon of the fata morgana – mirage – to illustrate the dynamics of real estate advertisements for exclusive housing developments in Cairo. In doing so, we investigate some of the ways in which public media and advertising create a display of the urban that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. At the same time, this urban visual is produced and shaped by the intersectional dynamics of embedded societal norms.

Viele werden sie kennen: die Werbespots von Airbnb aus dem Frühjahr 2022. Dort tauchen wir in „Airbnb Stories“ ein. Wir begleiten glückliche Urlauber:innen, sehen privat anmutende Fotos und hören stimmungsvolle Musik. Die authentischen Urlaube, die hier beworben werden, sind „made possible by Hosts“. Diese Hosts treten in den Werbespots aber gar nicht direkt in Erscheinung. Einzig kleine Grußkärtchen geben einen Hinweis auf sie, im Obstkorb oder bei der Einwegkamera als Begrüßungsgeschenk. Die Gäste, die wir sehen, residieren in eleganten Stadtwohnungen, sonnigen Villen oder gemütlichen Ferienhäusern. Diese Urlaube „made possible by Hosts“ scheinen wenig damit zu tun zu haben, dass jemand ab und zu ein kurzzeitig leerstehendes Zimmer oder eine Wohnung über Airbnb vermietet.

In the South Korean metropole of Seoul, queer people have been increasingly pushing their way into the public sphere for more than two decades. The Seoul Queer Culture Festival, for example, has made it to the forecourt of the city hall against quite a bit of resistance, and the first neighborhood pride event took place in the Mapo district in 2022. Sung Un Gang, a member of subproject B03, is interested in such space-appropriating changes in the LGBTQ movement. He is not only interested in already well-documented processes, but also in how queer people create new spaces and recode old ones through quite mundane everyday actions.

Access to the internet has long been considered as essential as water and electricity supply; the UN declared online communication a human right several years ago. But despite its enormous social importance, not much is known about the administrative infrastructure behind it, i.e. who exactly controls the infrastructure of the net and what kind of ideas guide them. The subproject B02 “Control/Space” wants to change that, as project member René Tuma explains.