Where in the city do people meet across political divides? Does the design and programming of the city have a role to play in that regard? These are some of the democratic and urban questions that have driven researchers from the Techno-Anthropology Lab and city designers from Gehl to construct the map of political diversity, which you will now explore.

We often use statistics about the residents’ demographics to discuss the diversity of a city. This map provides an entirely different view founded in another type of data. We have attempted to map Copenhagen’s potential for political encounters by combining digital traces from Facebook and qualitative observations. We use people’s engagements with the city space as a starting point to make visible the divisions that do not rely on gender, age, and zip code.

We have embarked on this mapping because we believe that it is vital that humanists and city planners collectively experiment with new digital data sources to put a focus on the more human aspects of the city. In a time where ‘smart cities’ translate to efficiency and sensor-based streamlining of the hard infrastructure of the city (cars, roads), we suggest that we can also use the digital datascape to inform us on patterns in human relations and meetings. In this particular project, we try to create a ‘feedback loop’ between the digital traces and people’s actual experience of the city as it is.

Our map should not be read as the Truth about how to partition the city by political views. The goal with the project is to make our data available to you, in a way such that you – as a user- can explore, can situate yourself in it and ask it critical questions. If it works as an empirical starting point into a debate about what is valuable in our city – or what we could and should use the new data sources for – then we have achieved what we had hoped for.

We hope that you in that spirit will explore the map and the method. We also want you to share your opinion with us. What have we overlooked or misunderstood? Where did we hit the nail on the head? Voice your thoughts, if you wish to suggest a better approach to data, have a data source that might add another dimension to the map, or just have a perspective on the use of digital data.