Juliana Gonçalves

Citizenship in the Digital City: Interactions Between Dominant and Alternative Imaginaries

Digital technologies are increasingly integrated into urban governance, planning, and everyday life. They are often promoted as tools to democratise decision-making and enhance participation. Yet, these technologies are shaped by digital imaginaries, which are collective visions linking technology to particular forms of social order. Competing imaginaries coexist: dominant ones, often aligned with smart city agendas, tend to prioritise efficiency, managerial logics, citizen surveillance, and corporate interests, while alternative ones emerge from grassroots initiatives that centre justice, resistance, the right to the city, and everyday practices. These imaginaries shape not only technological infrastructures but also the ways citizens are positioned: as data sources, monitored/surveilled objects, service users, partners, or active co-producers of urban knowledge. The tension between dominant and alternative imaginaries raises critical questions about participation, governance, and the role of citizens in shaping urban futures.

This study asks: How do digital imaginaries configure the role of citizens in urban planning? Specifically, it examines (1) how governments, grassroots initiatives, and research projects articulate digital imaginaries; (2) how dominant and alternative imaginaries converge, conflict, or interact; and (3) how these imaginaries position citizens within planning and governance processes.

The project will follow a case study design in a chosen city. Possible methods include discourse and media analysis of policy documents, platforms, and online communications, combined with semi-structured interviews with government officials, community organisers, and researchers. Creative research methods are also welcome. Data may be analysed qualitatively through thematic coding, or complemented with quantitative approaches such as natural language processing to explore larger datasets (e.g., social media data).

*There is a possibility to collaborate with the Centre for BOLD Cities within their project “Start Making Sense” (w/ Arthur De Jaeger).

Contact person: Juliana Gonçalves J.E.Goncalves@tudelft.nl.

Understanding and visualising cultural values in urban planning

Urban planning increasingly relies on digital tools, yet cultural values are shaped by people’s practices, heritage, and social life and, thus, remain difficult to capture. Recent research points to ways of addressing this gap. Thuvander et al. (2025) propose integrating cultural values into Urban Digital Twins through multi-level visualisations, while Herzog et al. (2024) introduce “Public Value Spheres” to empirically identify and map citizen values, including their overlaps and conflicts. This thesis explores how cultural values can be identified, analysed, and visualised to support inclusive and democratic planning.

Key questions include: how can cultural values be empirically captured in urban space, what forms of visualisation best communicate them, and how can conflicts or complementarities among values be made visible?

The project will adopt an exploratory, mixed-methods approach. A case study of an urban district in transformation will be analysed using participatory or secondary data. Techniques such as text analysis, spatial mapping, and clustering will be applied to identify and locate cultural values. Arts-based and creative methods are also welcome. Building on existing frameworks mentioned above, prototype visualisations (maps, diagrams, digital models, etc.) will be developed and tested.

*There is an opportunity to collaborate with Chalmers University and the municipality of Gothenburg (TBC).

Contact person: Juliana Gonçalves J.E.Goncalves@tudelft.nl.

Alternative imaginaries and their transformative potential

Despite growing consensus that addressing the socio-ecological crisis of today requires fundamental changes in the way we conceive and design socio-technical systems, policy and planning remain fixated on short-term, technology-based incremental improvements within existing systems. This approach hardly addresses systemic issues and completely ignores structural concerns. In response to this apparent inertia, the last decade has witnessed a growing literature on imagination and imaginaries; for some, a sign of hope, for others, of a “crisis of imagination”.

Despite their importance, the study of imaginaries is still emerging and, thus, presents many research gaps, particularly when it comes to radical/alternative imaginaries that challenge the status quo. Firstly, there is a tendency to treat imaginaries as abstract or utopian concepts without sufficient engagement with their practical applications. Existing studies are limited to discursive and symbolic inquiries, while the pathways through which these imaginaries can influence policy, inspire bottom-up movements, or reshape institutional frameworks are often insufficiently explored. Secondly, the existing body of work frequently overlooks the diverse contexts in which imaginaries emerge and operate. Different socio-political environments not only foster unique forms of radical thinking but also shape the response to alternative imaginaries. In many cases, alternative imaginaries are appropriated by status quo actors (e.g., green/pinkwashing or arts-led gentrification) or simply ignored by mainstream discourse (e.g., considered not economically feasible or scalable). In other cases, they are met with systemic violence, usually through persecution of Indigenous peoples and community leaders.

By addressing these gaps, this project seeks to critically understand how alternative imaginaries are negotiated, fixated and sustained within their socio-spatial contexts, providing a comprehensive account of the transformative potential of alternative climate imaginaries.

Contact person: Juliana Gonçalves J.E.Goncalves@tudelft.nl.

The role of solidarity in collective action

When crises happen, solidarity among people, communities, and nations often emerges as a collective response, driving mutual aid and crisis relief initiatives. During COVID-19 pandemic, the elderly and the sick have been assisted by volunteers in safe walks, food was distributed to migrants, protective gear was crowdsourced for healthcare workers, among many other solidarity stories. However, despite the clear positive impact of these initiatives, solidarity seemed to have ended as soon as we got back to “normal”.

From a western perspective, the sociologist Emile Durkheim distinguished between two forms of solidarity: mechanical solidarity, based on what individual members of a community have in common, and organic solidarity, based on mutual differences, with individuals functioning much like the interdependent but differentiated organs of a living body. Interestingly noted by Veraart et al. (2021) in the editorial Solidarity and COVID-19, organic solidarity resonates with the South African philosophical concept of Ubuntu: “I am, because you are”. The word ubuntu is part of the Zulu phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, which means a person is a person through other people.

Exploring the question of how to bring solidarity from response to action, this project studies the role of (organic) solidarity in collective action (e.g., in social movements, community organisations, urban commons). In non-western contexts, Ubuntu or other local ‘equivalent’ value replaces are also considered. The project aims to bring these insights into urban planning and design to foster solidarity in cities.

Contact person: Juliana Gonçalves J.E.Goncalves@tudelft.nl.

The power of the margins: Towards everyday utopianism

As news outlets report daily on spiralling socio-ecological crises and their disastrous consequences, it is difficult to believe that another world is possible. Urban inequalities continue to deepen worldwide, exacerbated by austerity measures and climate change impacts. In response, cities want to become smart, sustainable, circular, and/or resilient. However, several scholars have showed that these initiatives have often failed to deliver on their promises and, instead, have exacerbated inequalities and created new forms of dispossession (Shelton, 2015; Wiig, 2016; Thatcher, 2016; Savini, 2019; Amorim, 2021). The IPCC even coined the term ‘maladaptation’ to describe climate initiatives that, instead of creating adaptive capacities, have pushed people into further climate vulnerability.

Some scholars argue that the focus of cities on strategy and action comes at the expense of efforts in developing coherent long-term city visions. An imbalance between vision, strategy and action leads to a disconnection between short-term action and long-term planning. Obviously, the fact that political cycles are short-term and climate change challenges need long-term action exacerbates this disconnection. Not surprisingly, maladaptation is associated with short-term, fragmented, single-sectoral, and non-inclusive governance. Another major criticism about urban transition visions is the strong reliance on so-called experts: City visions are at best informed by the needs and aspirations of citizens and other “non-expert” urban actors. These highly exclusive processes often do not lead to disruptive alternatives, resulting in business-as-usual visions detached from citizens’ lived experiences.

Against this background, this project studies the role of ‘everyday utopianism’ in creating alternative transition visions by exploring the disruptive power of ‘everyday life’ as a “locus for the development of non-alienated or emancipatory tendencies” (Gardiner, 2006).

Contact person: Juliana Gonçalves J.E.Goncalves@tudelft.nl.

spatialising participation: an Analysis through Lefebvre’s Three Spaces

The evolution of the concept of “inclusive cities” has been a dynamic process influenced by the insights of prominent scholars and international institutions committed to fostering equitable urban development. One of the early trailblazers was Jane Jacobs, whose seminal work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961) laid the groundwork for understanding the significance of community involvement, diverse urban spaces, and resident participation in shaping neighbourhoods. In 2010, Susan Fainstein urged for a more just and inclusive urban planning approach in “The Just City,” highlighting the importance of social justice in the development of cities. In planning practice, an important shift in the direction happened with the introduction of participation as a conduit for capturing contextual dynamics and local knowledge. However, while participatory practices are commonly believed to foster a sense of ownership, commitment, responsibility, and social cohesion within communities and among stakeholders, several challenges remain. Existing literature has revealed several organisational/governance challenges, such as limited and unrepresentative participation, insufficient community influence on decisions, and disparities in knowledge levels among stakeholders.

While recognising these important challenges, this project critically analyses the role of space in participatory planning. Specifically, the project inquires: How does space shape participation, and how does participation shape space? Using Lefebvre’s three spaces, the project will provide a framework to evaluate the extent to which participatory planning affects and is affected by space.

Contact person: Juliana Gonçalves J.E.Goncalves@tudelft.nl.