Urban Archiving for Smarter Cities: Archival Practices beyond Open Data

Urban Archiving is a research theme within the project Living Archives exploring the roles of archives and archival practices in a digitized society. One of the aims is to create design interventions dedicated to exploring, prototyping and testing relevant possibilities for digital archives and archiving practices in various contexts, such as urban development. The research intervention presented in this paper explores and prototypes tools and archiving practices for capturing, representing, and disseminating the intangible culture heritage of a particular neighbourhood, or an area in a city. The data generated is of a qualitative kind, and can be used as a complement, or maybe even a provocation to the image of a neighbourhood outlined by open data sources. If urban open data can be useful in answering the "What?" of a city, the methods and tools we develop can help answering the "Why?" and thus deepen our understanding of urban areas, and how we can plan for sustainable cities.