About the project

YOUrban is a research project into social media, design and the city. It investigates tools and means to creating engagement and a sense of ownership and responsibility towards our physical, social and cultural world.

YOUrban aims to explore how social media may be used in an urban context to challenge the notion that our environment is given, or imposed on us as citizens. Instead YOUrban intends to investigate how social media may be employed to help foster agency and power in both creating and transforming our urban surroundings. We will investigate tools and means to creating engagement and a sense of ownership and responsibility towards our physical, social and cultural world. The project takes the city of Oslo, Norway, as its setting and has the overall goal of applying and reassessing theories and practices of performativity in urban mileus.

Central research questions: How may multi-perspective social media discourses be designed and applied within a variety of urban contexts to enable and motivate participation in our daily lives in cities? How might the design of social media for urban settings be informed by our performative discursive enacments in them?