URBAN EPISTEMICS AND DIGITAL PUBLICS - A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR CITIZEN PARTICIPATION ACROSS ONITSHA, LAGOS, AND INNSBRUCK

Abstract

Contemporary European architectural discourse increasingly confronts the limits of top-down urban knowledge, who speaks for the city, and through which instruments? This paper develops a computational framework for civic participation that reads geolocated social media data as an index of lived urban experience, positioning digital publics as spatial actors whose collective outputs constitute a form of distributed spatial knowledge. Drawing on 16,700 geotagged Twitter/X posts (2016–2025) collected from three structurally distinct cities, Onitsha (population 7.5M, West African market metropolis), Lagos (21M, Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest coastal megacity), and Innsbruck (300,000, Alpine European university city), we apply Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), Word2Vec semantic embeddings, and kernel density estimation to produce comparative spatial intelligence of citizen priorities across radically different urban types. Model outputs are reported with explicit performance metrics and triangulated against thirty resident validation workshops. The three cities represent three distinct regimes of urbanity, market informality, ecological precarity, and touristic commodification. Their juxtaposition challenges monolithic definitions of urban intelligence and compels European urban computation to confront its epistemological partiality. Results reveal structurally divergent spatial discourses. Lagos digital publics concentrate around coastal infrastructure and political protest; Onitsha’s around market networks and transnational diaspora identity, Innsbruck’s around recreational mobility and seasonal tourism pressure. SOM image clusters expose contrasting visual cultures carrying direct architectural implications for public space design. The methodology contributes to the European digital urbanism tradition, from Batty’s complexity urbanism to Ratti’s senseable city paradigm, while critically extending it toward Global South epistemologies and decolonial planning theory.