Times of a Square

The article has been developed in the broader frame of my MA thesis. Time as an urban dimension has always been problematic for urban researchers due to its highly abstract and context-dependent nature. In this work, I present a method to critically address temporal data through contextual information. The growing interest in critical studies on data is leading to promising frameworks and theories on how to acknowledge and appraise data context and multiple perspectives. Feminism, urban geography, digital humanities, and other fields are slowly absorbing these theories and are developing interesting approaches to practically make use of them. However, urban studies still lacks a scalable and reliable method that operationalizes these ideas for the city: how can spatio-temporal data be examined critically to visualize meaningful and contextualized temporal patterns of the urban environment?

Time of a Square is a long-read, scrollable article to explore temporality in Rosenthaler Platz, Berlin. Apart from designing and supporting the development of the final article and its visualization, I critically addressed and structured a novel data collection model to gather situated knowledge in the urban context. The resulting work is both an interactive webpage to navigate situated data and a series of printed artifacts. The project was exhibited at Torino Graphic Days 2019.