The RC21 Conference on Urban and Regional Development, held from 20-22 July 2026 at the University of Vienna, brought together hundreds of researchers to examine the theme: “Inequalities and The City: Old Issues, New Challenges”. As urban populations grow, so do disparities in housing, social segregation, and political power, issues exacerbated by climate change, conflict, and globalization. This year’s conference tackled these enduring and emerging challenges, fostering critical discussion on sustainability and urban coexistence.  

Image: Mario L. Small, keynote speaker on “Large-scale Data and understanding economic inequality”.  

Among the highlights was the Digital Frontier session, organised by Justus Uitermark and Ayona Datta, which explored how digital technologies – from AI to social media – reshape urban governance, labor, and knowledge production. The three consecutive sessions on this topic examined how corporations and governments extend control through digitisation, commodifying everyday life while creating new power dynamics.  

Juliette Davret presented her research titled “Data Intermediaries and Territorial, Labour, and Epistemic Frontiers in Ireland’s Planning Digitalisation” co-authored with Rob Kitchin. This paper analysed how private data intermediaries digitise planning records, transforming how spatial data is accessed and governed. Through a year-long case study, it examined how these intermediaries dissolve local boundaries, reconfigure professional roles, and create new regimes of visibility in urban development (e.g., searching for planning project based on price or scale, but not on community interests or environmental concerns). 

This presentation was part of a dynamic session alongside four other scholars, focusing in particular on the complexities of digital frontiers in planning and governance, addressing topics such as augmented reality in Indonesia, GIS practices in a master’s program in India, predictive slum mapping with geospatial technologies and urban digital twins in France.  

The conference concluded with a thought-provoking walking tour of Vienna, focusing on “hostile design”, urban elements like anti-homeless benches, and exclusionary public spaces that reflect deeply entrenched inequalities.  

Overall, the RC21 Conference was a great success. Thanks to the organising board for putting together this conference, which offered many opportunities to meet new colleagues, exchanges ideas, and learn how to address inequalities in cities!  

The Data Stories team are delighted to welcome four new members to our team. Three of the new starters will be using their expertise in housing, planning, property and geospatial analysis to help further our research in these areas. We also have a curator joining the team who will be helping us plan and realise a forthcoming exhibition which is currently scheduled to take place in Dublin this October. 

Brendan Fox

Brendan is an independent curator, writer, lecturer, and cultural event producer based in Dublin and Rome. Brendan has been hired to curate our Data Stories exhibition in October. Brendan comes with extensive experience curating national and international artists in a broad spectrum of settings. They have held multiple residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and have curated from the national collection. We are extremely excited to learn from Brendan and their curatorial choices that will shape the two-week exhibition in Dublin’s Digital Hub. 

Leah Aaron 

Leah will step into a postdoctoral position to conduct case study research on Northern Ireland. This research will complement the work we have completed on the Irish property and planning digital terrain and provide comparative insights. Leah is moments from completing her PhD in Urban Planning at University College London (UCL). She has extensive experience working with housing data and is well-placed to conduct detailed data audits and assess data quality. 

Leah Fennell Neville 

Samuel Mutter and Carla Maria Kayanan welcome SPUR awardee Leah Fennell Neville. Over the summer, Leah will work with Sam and Carla on their project, Critical inquiries and creative narratives: Exploring Irish data landscapes using arts-based methods to explore the data land issues that underpin important decisions shaping housing, planning and property development. In October, Leah will present findings to the MU community at the SPUR Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium. We hope the final creative output will also be featured at the Data Stories October exhibition. With thanks to MUSSI for awarding Sam and Carla the MUSSI Small Grants Scheme to fund Leah’s research experience! 

Sabreen Lyman 

Sabreen is a current MU student on the MSc in GIS/Remote Sensing in Geography. Over the summer, Sabreen will work with us to create a database of longitudinal datasets and to set up a data archive for the public. Sabreen will also produce material for our 3D printed model to help us build data stories for the October exhibition. 

We are grateful for the expertise each new member of the team is bringing and look forward to working with them. With this expanded team, the coming months promise to be among our most productive and creative yet. Keep following us here to find out what comes next.

On Tuesday 28 April Danielle was invited to speak as a respondent to Dr Aline Cruvinel; architect, urbanist and researcher, and Murray Cox; founder of Inside Airbnb. Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb’s impact on residential communities. The event, held through the Henry Halloran Urban and Regional Research Initiative Sydney, was titled From Inside Airbnb to Housing Justice: The Role of Civic Urban Technology, and hosted by Dr Claire Daniel.

Left to right: Murray Cox, Aline Cruvinel, Jack Moon, Danielle Hynes and Claire Daniel. (Photo by Greta Werner)  

Aline and Murray presented their recently published report on the threat of short-term rentals to housing, available here. The report takes a global data approach, connecting different spatial scales and assisting in explaining how short-term rentals operate at a global level, and the threat they pose to housing. This approach allowed Aline and Murray to identify the global impacts of Airbnb’s network, and argue that it ‘connects local housing markets to global tourism flows’ in a way that threatens long term housing. The report states the number of Airbnb listings per 10,000 inhabitants for many countries – demonstrating just how prevalent the platform is in many places, and analyses the impact of large events, such as the Olympic Games, on numbers of Airbnb listings.  

Murray went on to outline the origins of Inside Airbnb and some of the impact it has had, tracing in particular the case study of New York City, which has been relatively successful in effectively regulating Airbnb. In NYC registration has been introduced. Requiring hosts register assists regulation enforcement. This is combined with platform accountability, where Airbnb is fined for hosts who are not registered. This, along with other legislation, has dramatically reduced the number of whole premises Airbnb listings. Murray argues that platform accountability is essential for effective regulation for short term rentals. This puts the onus not only on hosts to follow the rules, but on the platforms to ensure hosts are doing so.  

Jack Moon then discussed his work analysing evictions in New South Wales (NSW). Jack is Data and Research Coordinator at the Tenants Union of NSW, a network of tenancy specialist legal centres operating across the state. Jack has been looking through court listings to identify how often community and public housing providers use termination proceedings (aka evictions), and which landlords do so most frequently. This work is open source, and those interested can check it out here.    

Finally, Danielle discussed the work of the Community Action Tenants Union eviction database group, particularly the work that went into the report and website, launched last year. Danielle gave a brief overview of publicly available evictions data in Ireland, and the work of the eviction database group in scraping and mapping legal and illegal evictions across the country, and pointed to the difference in available data in Ireland, compared with NSW (where only tribunal listing data is published). Danielle also briefly mentioned CATU Galway’s current ‘Break Up with Airbnb’ campaign, Inside Airbnb is supporting CATU in some of this work.  

Across all of the projects discussed at the event, both data, and those with the knowledge, skills and capacity to work with that data are essential to translate it into a comprehensible format that can make change in the world. This is a constant challenge in civic tech projects, where people are often working unpaid, fitting project work in around other commitments. Creating a broad group of people who are invested in seeing whatever the project is through to fruition, and maintaining it in an ongoing basis is an important consideration for this kind of work.  

Thanks to Claire Daniel, Nicole Gurran, Greta Werner and Jacqueline Tyrrell for organising an excellent event.  

We are delighted to be part of the Research Handbook on Digital Data: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, a new volume bringing together scholars from a wide range of fields to investigate digital data and its growing role in contemporary life. The book delves into the role and consequences of digital data across multiple dimensions of organisational and social life.  

Spanning 408 pages, 24 chapters, and 56 contributors, this Research Handbook surveys critical scholarship across several disciplines, from management and sociology to economics and geography, building a solid conceptual foundation for understanding the growing significance of digital data in today’s world.  

The book is organised into six sections: an introduction, followed by Data Foundations, Data Design, Data in Practice, Data Governance, and Data Use, and closing with an afterword. Our contribution sits within Section 5 of the book, dedicated to Data Use. This section examines how the digital turn and data-driven systems are reshaping the way different domains are organised, managed or governed, as well as the practices implemented within them, and how this continues to evolve with emerging developments such as synthetic data or distributed machine learning. The chapters collectively raise and tackle both new and longstanding issues that demand social, political, regulatory and legal responses, around questions of privacy, ethics, data droughts and deluge, hallucinations and more.  

Our chapter “The nature and development of a planning data ecosystem” is accessible in our open access archive [here]. It examines the nature and development of data ecosystems through a comprehensive case study of Ireland’s planning development and control data ecosystems from 2000-2024. Using assemblage theory as a theoretical framework, we conceptualise data ecosystems as assemblages of data assemblages — complex socio-technical arrangements that evolve through non-linear, contingent processes. The Irish planning system demonstrates how data ecosystems develop through “jerry-rigging” over time, involving 31 local authorities, national agencies, and various digital platforms that create both functional workflows and significant data frictions. The research employs qualitative methodology including stakeholder interviews, system mapping, and data flow analysis to reveal how technical incompatibilities, organisational cultures, and resource constraints impede data mobility across the ecosystem. Despite operational challenges, the system functions through adaptation and ongoing reform initiatives. The study contributes to understanding data ecosystems as emergent, palimpsestic socio-technical configurations requiring further empirical and theoretical investigation across sectors and domains. 

The book was launched on April 1 by its editors Aleski Aatonen (Stevens Institute of Technology), Marta Stelmaszak (Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve University).  During the launch, Rob Kitchin presented the section on Data Use where our chapter appears. The launch drew 138 live participants, and you can (re)watch the recording [here].   

It took almost exactly two years from the initial idea to the publication, and the Data Stories team is glad to be part of it!  

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Book chapter reference: Davret, J., Kayanan, C. M., Kitchin, R., & Mutter, S. (2026). The nature and development of a planning data ecosystem. In A. Aaltonen, M. Stelmaszak, & K. Lyytinen (Eds.), Research Handbook on Digital Data (pp. 324–342). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035348718.00032

It’s the Spring teaching term, which means Carla has been busy with curriculum development, teaching and assessment. Regardless, Carla has managed to participate in two Data Stories relevant events, collecting a quirky pair of BeNeLux designed conference socks and a dinner in a charming fondue chalet overlooking the Zurich mountains! 

Land-Use Planning in the Digital Age: Processes, Impacts and Opportunities 

On 5-6 February, Carla was invited to attend the workshop, Land-Use Planning in the Digital Age: Processes, Impacts and Opportunities. The workshop was hosted by the SILAR and DISCLOSE project teams, both headed by Principal Investigator Prof. h.c. Dr. Anna Hersperger and held in the Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL). 

Held over two days, the workshop included a series of presentations by the project team and by invited speakers representing both academia and the planning practice. Two central questions the project team were investigating were: 1) How does digitalisation reshape processes and practices? And 2) What are the promises and pitfalls of digitalisation in land-use planning? Both of these questions were underpinned by concerns around how research findings could make an impact for practice.  

What made this workshop stand out was its focus on methods to extract high level insights from all the participants. In addition to the standard format of speaker presentation followed by Q&A, Hersperger’s team incorporated activities such as short free writing sessions to stimulate discussion, round table discussions based on specific prompts, group work to determine gaps in our knowledge and fixed research questions for future research agendas. For example, the two central questions from above were whiteboarded in small groups. Each group considered answers to the questions and provided suggestions on theoretical gaps that remain unexplored and unanswered. Or for another example, the team created placemats for use during the lunch break and these mats had provocative comments such as: 

“Land-use planning in the digital age means modelling the future with GIS, big data, and algorithms—only to be surprised that humans still don’t behave like the model.” 

“Digital land-use planning: when the algorithm knows where everything should go, but not why no one wants it there.” 

Another stand out was the deliberate attempt to bring together researchers and practitioners from varying European countries. These types of workshops demonstrate how the academy has expanded in its effort to interject research into practice. Importantly, the work showcased demonstrated the innovative work happening in the WSL on the digitalisation of planning and the ongoing efforts to theorise how digitalisation is concretely impacting the planning profession. Many questions were raised and left unanswered—and indicator of the challenges the planning profession will grapple with in the transition to full digitalisation. 

Ultimately, the project team aims to co-produce a co-authored essay based on the workshop with all the involved participants; a large feat but a further example of how the project team worked to think outside the box and to create an outstanding, though provoking conference. 

BeNeLux Conference 

From 8 – 10 April, Carla attended the inaugural BeNeLux conference, held at KU Leuven’s campus in Belgium. Welcoming the audience on the first day, Ate Poorthuis explained that the origin story of BeNeLux is rooted in the desire for regional colleagues to network with each other without having to travel long distances or fly. This first inaugural conference drew over 530 registered participants, representing 27 countries and over 200 institutions. For Ireland, we had three nameless and unfindable registered participants, including Carla! 

The programme for the conference included 90 parallel sessions, 400 presentations and, based on the many sessions attended, a healthy representation of Geography’s many sub-disciplines. Erik Swyngedouw, issuing the inaugural keynote address, provided a sweeping history of human geography, in a presentation aptly titled, Meandering Across Time and Space: A Geographical Expedition Through a Reactionary Discipline. What Swyngedouw covered was profound and too challenging to summarise in this blog post, but in his response to the prompt on the role of Geography in the past, present and future, Swyngedouw pointedly called out the need to break from intellectual dishonesty, to recognise that we are the architects of populist discourse and that we need to  name key mechanisms of struggle and speak truth to them. Importantly, he claimed, we need to specify our geographical desire and mobilise our intellect towards it, speaking truth to power in the process. 

Our Commodity Narrative’s paper, Playing the Housing Market:  Creatively exploring housing commodification through a gamified spoof property website was scheduled for the second day of the conference. It was one of five papers the session co-organised by Bettina Van Hoven and Julia Munuera Garcia from University of Groningen in a special session titled Gamefying Geography: Play, Participation, and Pedagogy in the Geographical Curriculum. Though the session was designed to focus on the role of games to teach concepts in Geography, our Commodity Narratives work appealed to the organisers because of their long-standing interests in the use of arts-based methods and creative approaches to research. 

The greatest benefit of presenting the work were the questions from the audience that forced deep reflection on the Unreal Homes spoof property website we have produced: How does one win? What is the role of fun? What type of affective responses are you seeking from the users? These questions are critical to learn how to best define and describe our process on this case study, and to consider our individual and collective aims and objectives as we reach the final stages of finalising our satirical website Unreal Homes. Presenting the work and fielding questions has already led to provocative discussions amongst the team members. It was also rewarding to see Unreal Homes gleefully received from the conference attendees (one even remarked that the mortgage calculator was genius) and that even without access to the site to play it, the presentation of the satirical content and games alone elicited laughs from the audience.