What is an inclusive city? Reconfiguring participation in planning with geospatial photovoice to unpack experiences of urban belonging among marginalised communities

Abstract

Visual research has historically been productive in foregrounding marginalised voices through photovoice as alternative to the written and oral forms of participation that dominate public participation. Photovoice projects have however been slow to leverage digital and spatial technologies for reworking the method in ways that enable geospatial analysis and collect structured metadata that can be used in workshops to bring different groups together around unpacking urban problems. The Urban Belonging project contributes to this by testing a new application, UB App, in an empirical study of how participants from seven marginalised communities in Copenhagen experience the city, including ethnic minorities, deaf, homeless, physically disabled, mentally vulnerable, LGBTQ+, and expats in Denmark. From a dataset of 1459 geolocated photos, co-interpreted by participants, the project first unpacks community-specific patterns in how the city creates experiences of belonging for different groups. Second, it examines how participants experience places differently, producing multilayered representations of conflicting viewpoints on belonging. The project hereby brings GIS and digital methods capabilities into photovoice and opens new epistemological flexibilities in the method, making it possible to move between; qualitative and quantitative analysis; bottom-up and top-down lenses on data; and demographic and post-demographic ways or organising participation.