Dr Sarah Barns

Platform Urbanism: The Role of City Labs, Data Infomediaries and Open Government Experiments in Urban Governance

Funding period: 1 November 2013 – 31 October 2016
Type of funding: Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Sarah Barns is a Research Fellow based at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney. Her research examines how urban knowledge is being shaped through smart technologies and pervasive data, addressing new institutional alignments and governance arrangements emerging in key digital cities (New York, Shanghai, Christchurch), including open government partnerships, urban innovation laboratories, and new digital specialist jobs. This research builds on her doctoral thesis, The death & life of the real-time city: re-imagining the city of digital urbanism, which incorporated ideas from cultural geography, urban studies, sound history, utopian studies, and social and cultural theory, to locate and critique the geographical imaginations of contemporary digital urbanism through a situated and creative sound-led response to the city of Sydney.

s.barns@westernsydney.edu.au
https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/dr_sarah_barns

Fellowship Publications

Barns, S. (2017). ‘Visions of urban informatics : from proximate futures to data-driven urbanism’, Fibreculture Journal, 29. DOI: 10.15307/fcj.29.204.2017

Barns, S., Cosgrave, E., Acuto, M., & Mcneill, D. (2017). ‘Digital Infrastructures and Urban Governance’, Urban Policy and Research, 35/1: 20–31. DOI: 10.1080/08111146.2016.1235032

Barns, S. (2016). ‘Mine your data: open data, digital strategies and entrepreneurial governance by code’, Urban Geography, 37/4: 554–71. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2016.1139876

Barns, S., & McNeill, D. (2015). ‘Online story-telling and the non-fiction city: An interview with Cassim Shepard, Founding Editor of Urban Omnibus’, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2/3: 307–15. DOI: 10.1386/jucs.2.3.307_1

Barns, S., & Sumartojo, S. (2015). ‘When One Idea Led to Another: Re-inscribing and Recombining Thinking Spaces Using Night-time Projections at the Australian National University’, The Senses and Society, 10/2: 179–99. DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2015.1042243

Barns, S. (2014). ‘Sounds Different: Listening to the City’. The Architectural Review.

Barns, S. (2014). ‘Sounds different: listening to the proliferating spaces of technological modernity in the city’, Space and Culture, 17/1: 4–15. DOI: 10.1177/1206331213494733

Barns, S. (2014). ‘Plus ça change? Remaking the city, “one site, one app, one click at a time”’, City, 18/2: 226–9. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2014.896655