Servus! Moikka! ¡Hola! My name is
Christoph Fink
I’m a social geographer, critical cartographer, and urban ethnographer
Servus! Moikka! ¡Hola! My name is
I’m a social geographer, critical cartographer, and urban ethnographer
In my research, I am interested in people and their activities, in particular in cities. I research in which ways urban spaces and their meaning are constantly re-negotiated, and ask how digital, social and physical spaces interrelate. I am curious which forms of expression, which actions, and speech-acts people use to constitute their world-views and to reproduce their everyday realities. My research focuses on maps, digital platforms as modern-day agoraí, and the creative ways civil movements argue for their causes. Recurring themes in my work include active mobility, urban sustainability, the Right to the City, and socially just sustainability transformation.
I just started as a Marie Skłodowska Curie Action postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna. In Sanderien Verstappen’s group, the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, I study the roles urban activists perform in public, for instance, when they present themselves/are presented as domain experts in news coverage. I am specifically interested in the multi-faceted motivations behind certain role-choices, how activists’ roles are perceived by their vis-a-vis, such as policymakers and the general public, and how role-choices influence the outcomes of lobbying efforts.
Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Digital Geography Lab of the University of Helsinki. I was involved in the Horizon-2020 project URBANAGE that investigated how and to which degree digital urban twins can help planners to better consider the specific preferences, needs, and restrictions of older people, improve accessibility for the ‘non-average resident’ to urban participation, and enable their rights to the city. In my most recent publications, together with colleagues, I discuss how data-driven smart city technologies could be made more inclusive to vulnerable population groups, and for whom 15-minute-cities actually work as intended. I am the maintainer of R⁵py, a Python library to rapidly compute travel times for different modes of transport as well as other accessibility measures at the scale of entire cities or metropolitan areas.
I completed my dissertation at the Helsinki Lab for Interdisciplinary Conservation Science. In the research leading up to it, I investigated whether the opportunities of big data, such as, for instance, social media, could be leveraged to address the ongoing global biodiversity crisis. To that avail, I evaluated different quantitative methods, such as natural language processing and image recognition, adapted to the use cases of conservation scientists and practitioners, and developed consistent workflows around them. As part of my research, I investigated the online trade in songbirds in Indonesia, and used the sentiment expressed in online news and social media to identify important events related to charismatic species.
In my Master’s thesis, I used a critical cartography perspective to investigate ‘implicit cartographies’. I asked which epistemologies are at play when volunteers contribute to collaborative cartographies, i.e., maps, map-like artifacts as well as collections of spatially explicit data, such as Wikipedia, and whether they reproduce different realities than maps authored by members of a more ‘explicit cartography’.
It is typical for my work to liberally change back and forth between quantitative and qualitative methods, and between different ontological and epistemological positions. Not least thanks to the topics of my PhD research and my first postdoctoral research projects, I am firm in quantitative methods, for instance, in the area of (urban) data science, but I also strive to keep up with the latest developments in qualitative, in particular, urban ethnography methods. I am a fond reader of critical urban theory, and enjoy discussions around the power of maps and the everyday structuration of space.
The meaning of (urban) space is undergoing constant renegotiation, it is reproduced in everyday actions and in political discourse. In many cities, urban activists advocate for a more just distribution of physical urban space away from motorised traffic towards sustainable, human-scale cities. Most activists act on their own behalf, as concerned or affected residents; others choose to perform specific roles, for instance, as topic experts.
In this upcoming research project at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, I will investigate which roles urban activists perform, how they choose a role, and which motives influence the choice. I ask whether activists’ performativity can shift the political landscape in their favour, and how performed roles are perceived by politicians, lobby groups, and the public. I am interested in the influence of situational, cultural, and political settings; specifically, whether urban activists perform different roles online and offline, in societies trusting in experts and in more populist societies, and in the Global North and in the majority world.
I will employ a mixed-method approach that combines innovative quantitative methods from computational linguistics and social network analysis, and state-of-the-art qualitative methods from visual anthropology, digital ethnography, and digital anthropology. Beyond academic output, this research project will engage the public, among other channels, using videos posted to social media, and provide a ‘handbook’ to urban activists to support their work transforming our cities into more just and sustainable places.
The world is urbanising, and its residents are ageing. How can we leverage emerging technology, such as digital urban twins, to assist planners and policy-makers in providing for a ‘good life’ for older people and other vulnerable groups while ensuring data sovereignity and privacy?
In the Horizon 2020 project URBANAGE, together with 13 partners from six European countries, my colleague Elias Willberg and I investigate how methods from urban data science could foster an equitable and just urban sustainable transition. In particular, we develop tools to assess the accessibility using active transport modes beyond the average resident. We provide detailed data on how well different neighbourhoods in the three pilot study sites Helsinki, Flanders, and Santander, function for people with different mobility preferences, restrictions and challenges. Our work is informed by a series of co-creation workshops that we held together with colleagues from Forum Virium and other project partners during which we jointly gathered the local and traded knowledge of senior residents, city officials, and urban planners.
R⁵py is a Python library for rapid realistic routing on multimodal transport networks (walk, bike, public transport and car). It provides a simple and friendly interface to R⁵, the Rapid Realistic Routing on Real-world and Reimagined networks, a routing engine developed by Conveyal. R⁵py is inspired by r⁵r, a wrapper for R, and it is designed to interact with GeoPandas GeoDataFrames.
R⁵py offers a simple way to run R⁵ locally with Python, allowing the users to calculate travel time matrices and accessibility by different travel modes. Learn more about R⁵py at the library’s source code repository or its online documentation.
Critical perspectives, both societal-political, as well as vis-à-vis my own approaches and tools, is a cornerstone of my work. One prime example is the project austromorph.space, an interactive data visualisation page that I started together with my good friends Ramon Bauer, Michael Holzapfel, and Tina Frank on the occasion of the controversial elections for the Austrian federal president in 2016.
The page uses anamorphic maps, distorted to reflect the population density rather than surface area, to illustrate how election maps almost inevitably overrepresent rural voters. This effect was especially relevant and visible in the 2016 elections that lead to a run-off between the liberal green party’s candidate and the conservative candidate of a far-right party.
The maps were well-received and featured in evening news and multiple national news papers, as well as in an issue on ‘right(wing) spaces’ of the German ARCH+ magazine for architecture and urbanism.