Paper I'm presenting at the Griffith University Centre for Public Culture and Ideas Conference this week on 'Creative Communities'.

1. Rethinking online hyperlocal
urbanisms and creativity
Mark Bahnisch
Creative Industries Faculty, QUT
Fellow of the Centre for Policy
Development
16 April 2009
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2. Contexts of the research
• Smart Services CRC – Social Media work package 04 –
drivers of social media and user generated content
– Bruns, A. & Bahnisch, M. (2009) Social Media Report 1: State
of the Art
• Centre for Policy Development, Eidos Institute and
Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival
– Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation
– Bahnisch, Bentley, Carroli, Choi & Westbury (2009,
forthcoming)
– Event on 26 May
– http://www.brisculture.com
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3. Online communities and urbanism/s
• Affinity proceeds community (cf Grant 2009)
• Conclusions from MyHeimat – community can be
leveraged where locality and place are culturally
central
• The obsolescence of the ‘local news’ model in
the postmodern city
• Questions of social inclusion, community and
place
• So, what is the city?
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4. What is the city?
• “The city is not an organism” (Marshall 2009: 132)
• Digital urbanism/s are more than “augmented physical
spaces” (Aurigi & Di Cindio 2008)
• The city is an assemblage of human and non-human,
lived and produced socially as spaces (Lefevre 1991)
• The city is an imaginary (Prakash 2008)
• Politics, the imaginary and utopia (Bahnisch 2009)
• Urbanism is recombinative (Shane 2007)
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5. The recombinant city, digital culture/s
and heterotopias
• Shane (2007)
– Armatures, enclaves and heterotopias
• Shaping digital heterotopias
– There are no ‘digital natives’
– Co-creating digital literacies (Hartley 2009)
– The ‘creative city’ is not singular
– Mapping the traces of urban affinities
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6. Many Brisbanes
http://phenomenologist.deviantart.com/gallery/
– Not “our” Brisbane but
many Brisbanes
– The imaginative structure
of the city
– Mobilities, affinity and
place
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7. Many Brisbanes – the ‘creatives’
• Lea et al (2009), The Creative
Tropical City
– http://
www.creative.org.au/linkboard/results.chtml?filename_num
=262563
• What are the wellsprings of
creativity?
• How do heterotopias,
armatures and enclaves
intersect?
• What creates affinity?
• Creativity beyond the
‘creatives’
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8. Research questions
• What are the specificities
of place in Brisbane?
• How is the city imagined?
• How can the imaginative
structure of the city be
articulated to online
communities, innovatively
and inclusively?
• What place for affect in
online spaces?
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9. Questions, comments, feedback
• Thanks!
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