Mapping Urban Emotion. Connecting Still Data with Digital Stories

2026 Oct 28, 6:00 pm

Ms. Laura Cavanna

Do you know who the best architects and designers on the planet are? Ants. They build climate-controlled cities with sophisticated ventilation systems and zero emissions. However, there is a fundamental difference between ants and humans: ants live by order, and we live by inquiry. While ants achieve functional perfection through rigid, repetitive patterns, humans are an exploratory species driven by curiosity. If we focus only on “order”—efficiency and automated data—we risk building urban futures that are mere “human anthills” that erase local identity.

Developed within the Place Branding with Cultural Heritage module of the Master of Arts in Cultural Heritage Management programme at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong (HSUHK), this project introduces a pedagogical framework that de-centres urban branding by mapping a neighbourhood’s true emotional identity. The project begins with a live, online launch workshop in late October, where international participants and student cohorts from partner universities, including Milan and Naples, are introduced to a fieldwork protocol. Following the workshop, participants will carry out fieldwork in real urban intersections where old, traditional neighbourhoods directly meet modern corporate developments, collecting “Slow Data” through face-to-face resident interviews and hand-drawn analytical sketches. Their findings will then contribute to an asynchronous collective mapping project.

During the Biennial, HSUHK Master’s students will join this process in a live, hands-on digital laboratory, layering the collected sketches and interviews onto digital city maps. Using a controlled Generative AI pipeline, participants will synthesise these assets into an interactive global dashboard: “Mapping Urban Emotion: Connecting Still Data with Digital Stories”.

This research cycle operates in two distinct phases:

1. Analog Extraction (Slow Data)

Standing at real urban intersections, participants interview local residents face-to-face about their personal memories of the space. At the same time, they create hand-drawn analytical sketches, using notation marks to anchor the spoken memories and collected stories of different users directly to the site.

2. Digital Integration (The Heritage Brand Map)

In the workshop, these hand-drawn sketches are uploaded and layered onto digital maps. We digitally lock the authentic lines drawn by the human hand. AI is then used as a visual brush—it takes the residents’ stories as a text prompt to render the emotional mood and atmosphere over the data map of the city. The final output is an interactive digital dashboard that layers geographic data with deep human living heritage, offering stakeholders a concrete framework to brand and preserve cities based on authentic human sentiment.