As part of the minor programma Creative Cities, Michiel de Lange teaches the course Creative Urban Technologies: Exploring and Navigating the Smart and Social City.

This course aims to introduce students to the burgeoning cross-disciplinary field that studies the relationships between digital media technologies and today’s cities. Students investigate and develop insight into how these technologies shape city life. Particular attention is paid to recent developments and discussions in the area of smart cities and to developing people-centric views of urban futures.Under guidance, students will read literature thoroughly and critically, frame theoretical discussions in the field, position themselves, develop new ways of conceptualizing the treated issues, find sources, undertake a research project.

The course discusses current developments in smart city making, like urban games, urban screens and data, maker culture, and media art. These so-called urban new media shape contemporary public space, open up the city to new playful experiences, allow new roles for its citizens and visitors, create new forms of urban agency, and invite alternative ways of navigating the city.
As part of the minor Creative Cities the course explores the entanglements between ICTs and the creative city by focussing on the weekly themes, including:
– Smart and creative cities?: Addressing complex urban problems with digital technologies in today’s smart and social cities.
– Citizenship: Leveraging the creative potential of cities through participatory culture, co-creation, mobile apps and open data.
– Media art: Creative critique on the smart city with locative media, digital art and urban screens.
– Data, interfaces and code: Citizen sensing and navigating and authoring the city with location-based technologies and interactive cartography, quantified self, life-logging and mobile story-telling.
– Play and games: Reprogramming the city with urban games and play.
– Maker culture: City-making and do-it-yourself hacker culture with the help of new media technologies.

Course details

Course code: ME2V15008
Course description link