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This website documents the genesis and progress of my master thesis with the title

Urban spatial information as commons: Potentials of mobile communication
for peer based "produsage"

I will try to merge scholarship with grassroots activism by looking at applied mobile communication methods used by social movements or communities/people for their struggle in urban areas.

The thesis will draw upon the concept of the network-society which provides the theoretical background and the self-conception of the thesis and a case study whose aim is to deploy a small and lowcost d.i.y. text-messaging and digital map system in cooperation with a local community or local people in São Paulo/Brasil. This system shall be used by the people, for the people, according to their local context, ideas and wishes. It provide means to gather information submited by text messages and display them on a map of the local urban environment. The information on the map could then be used by the people to analyse the displayed information and initiate and realize steps that could lead to change or improvement of percieved problems but could also be used to further push already good things forward.

A more elaborated introduction into the whole topic can be found at the Introduction page.

This thesis is going to be writen at the Institue of Technology and Resources Management in Tropics and Subtropics (ITT) at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Johannes Hamhaber.