Canberra, the meticulously planned capital city of Australia, serves as a unique example of artificiality in urban development. In a nation characterized by organically grown cityscapes, Canberra highlights the intersection between human ambition and the developed world, showcasing the pros and cons of a pre-designed city.
Notably, Canberra has had an interesting relationship with self-presentation and city marketing over its lifetime. As a small-scale city, in need of both residents and culture alike, Canberra has presented its lifestyle in a variety of ways. Between the ‘perfect utopia’ at its inception, to the ‘quaint hidden gem’ of modern Australia (Fischer, 1989), understanding Canberra’s journey with self-perception provides a unique insight into both the history of the city, and the pitfalls of artificiality in urban development. “In Canberra’s Eyes” aims to unpack this journey, utilizing handpicked cultural data to uncover how Canberra’s original lifestyle aspirations compare to its modern-day counterpart.
Background
“In Canberra’s Eyes” is a digital exhibition that recounts Canberra’s journey with self-presentation and city marketing. Spanning three distinct periods, from the 1900’s to 2023, our curated gallery offers an interactive exploration of Canberra’s proposed lifestyles over the ages. The exhibition boasts a scalable dataset filled with a diverse range of cultural artefacts – including vintage ephemera, archival newspaper articles and many original maps and plans.
Theoretical Background
City marketing is the long-term process of implementing strategies to help retain or attract different target groups to a city (Hospers, 2009 & Ma et al., 2021). Mihalis (2007) suggests that city marketing has not only asserted itself as a fundamental part of urban development in recent decades but has also grown into an established field of research and academic subdiscipline. However, though city marketing has proven to have an immense impact on both tourists and residents alike, the number of genuinely evaluative case studies remain surprisingly small (Boyle, 1997 & Pacione, 1999). Therefore, we decided to utilize the field of city marketing as an entry point to study Canberra’s urban development, in hopes it may provide a unique insight into both the city’s evolution over time, and the implications it has had on its residency.
Though, the question now becomes – what features of city marketing reflect urban development? To answer this, we employed Hägerstrand’s (1982) broader notion of “urban lifestyles”. This concept suggests that the lifestyles of a city’s residents indicate the underlying structure behind the city and its eventual progression. An illustrative example of this can seen in the analysis of the ‘Environa’ – a Canberra-based real estate project, dating back 80 years. Here, Horsfield (2005) proposes the promotional strategies of the project were not to advertise the features of the house itself, but rather to advertise a potential lifestyle choice to new and existing residents.
Evidently, ‘lifestyles’ provide an effective way to demonstrate interconnections within and outside a city (Oliveira, 2020), presenting a humanistic landscape to explore urban development. This insight is precisely why we’ve adopted ‘lifestyles’ as the focus of our project – in hopes that it will provide a fresh and novel perspective on Canberra’s development from a distinctly humanistic standpoint.
Situation Within the Digital Humanities
While few projects are similar in topic to ours, there are plenty that have informed our project in other ways. Adopting the TaDiRAH framework (Borek, 2016), our project revolves around the interpretation and creation sectors of Digital Humanities research (particularly in the realms of data interpretation and website/exhibition development). Thus, we have looked towards projects of a similar nature, taking inspiration from their differing approaches. Between their ways of analyzing and aggregating data, the integration and creation of online exhibitions or even using them to highlight scope and scale concerns – situating ourselves within these projects have been fundamental to the development of our own.
One such project, Laws-of-ordered-form (Ridler, 2020), exhibits a downloadable handpicked data set – a selection of images from Victorian encyclopedias that have been manually classified and interpreted. Likewise, Penderecki’s Garden (Mickiewicz, 2022) operates similarly, manually selecting and analyzing artefacts, placing importance on the individual datapoints – rather than the dataset as a whole. This approach to data aggregation has not only informed our own project’s research methodologies but has displayed the importance of qualitative analysis. Evidently, these projects highlight the influence of individual artefacts on a project’s outcome – emphasizing that not all Digital Humanities projects must have an extremely expansive dataset or complex computing algorithm to establish interesting and effective conclusions.
Other works have also motivated our project’s deliverables and features. The Iconographic Encyclopedia (Rougeux, 2023) highlights not only the importance of crafting a user-friendly web experience, but the importance of implementing web content in a way that makes large amounts of material easily navigable and accessible. Magical Reflections (Hummer, 2021) offers similar insights, enhancing the digital experience through external linking – encouraging users to continue exploring the data on their own, rather than simply relying on the exhibition to provide conclusive analysis.
Data
Typically, lifestyle analysis involves the use of surveys and quantitative analysis, wherein scores are allocated based on statistical data points and algorithms. However, this approach does not reveal how a city wants to present its lifestyle, rather, only predicting the city’s actual lifestyle at any given time. Our project is focused on ascertaining how Canberra wants to portray its lifestyle, necessitating a departure from traditional methods and the adoption of a unique set of cultural data.
Based on our data aggregation frameworks (as outlined later), the final version of our exhibition contains 63 pieces of cultural data, spanning several digital and physical collections, including those from Trove and the NLA. These artefacts come in many forms, including ephemera (typically advertising materials), newspaper articles and vintage maps and plans. Though these artefacts differ from one another, through close reading and analysis – they all have the potential to present key ideas regarding Canberra’s ‘proposed lifestyle’ and provide findings that may be missed having taken a traditional, quantitative approach.
Fortunately, the dataset’s flexibility allows us to scale it according to our needs. Our project only requires enough data to answer our research question – something that can be accomplished with a relatively small dataset. This is a key reason why our project is geared towards the general public rather than academics, as our exhibition doesn’t conclusively cover Canberra’s lifestyle. Rather, the project looks to simply showcasing our initial findings in hopes of encouraging others to investigate the cultural data and form their own opinions.
Methodology
Our project has undergone several iterations and unique changes to reach its current state. As per the frameworks proposed by both Drucker (2021) and Maxwell (2013) the process of iterating, experimenting, and selecting cultural data is not a linear process. Rather, both the research question and dataset evolved as we explored, as did the project’s overall goals and final realization. While it’s impossible to discuss every change the project has undergone, we can highlight some notable iterations.
Initial Data Exploration
The project began by exploring the cultural artefacts made available by Trove. After discovering maps regarding the Federal Design Competition (Clough, 1909), we made the decision to investigate the influence of architecture and city planning on Canberra’s lifestyle. However, as we delved deeper into Trove’s dataset – paired with the NLA’s Ephemera collection – our perspective shifted. While Canberra’s architecture had already been explored across numerous projects and papers, we believed that by examining Canberra’s “proposed” lifestyle, our project could offer a fresh and unique take on the city.
Aggregation of Data
After deciding on our research question, we concluded it would make the most sense to present our project as an online exhibition (Drucker, 2021). We hoped that by doing so, the requirements of the dataset would already be refined enough to prove manageable – this, however, was not the case. Evidently, a structured methodology was necessary to help manage the project’s scale. To assist our selection, we developed the following aggregation frameworks :
Data Aggregation by Category
One of our early challenges was defining “lifestyle” and finding a clear-cut way to measure it with cultural data. Drawing inspiration from similar projects such as the OECD Better Life Index (2023) and The World Happiness Report (2023), alongside the analysis methods outlined by Braun (2008) we identified six key ‘lifestyle factors’. These were by no means concrete; however, we believed they would provide a sufficient answer to our research question without becoming overly ambitious. The final categories included: Environment, Walkability/Public Transport, Community and Social Climate, Housing, Education, Economy & Jobs.
Data Aggregation by Era
Similarly, we also decided upon three distinct eras to help limit the project’s scale whilst still providing a definitive answer to our research question. Based on findings from Freestone (2009) and Proudfoot (1994), we identified three key time periods that adequately represented Canberra’s history (in the scope of the project). These were: Canberra’s Origins (1900 – 1940s), Mid Century Canberra (1950s – 1980s), and Modern Canberra (1990s – 2023)
With these frameworks in place, the data became significantly more manageable. With our efforts spread across the resulting 18 categories, we manually located and compiled relevant artefacts into a spreadsheet. Though, our approach wasn’t perfect – due to the broad nature of the question and dataset, finding relevant cultural data was difficult. The only filters we were able to apply were the date range, the artefact type, and any keywords we believed were relevant to the category. This effectively meant each artefact would need to be manually read through to ensure it was appropriate to the project, resulting in a process that took much longer than expected.
Data Analysis
After collating our data, we began analyzing each artefact to produce our exhibition’s script. With each, we attempted to answer the question “What does this show us about the proposed lifestyle of the time?” Fortunately, since we had already manually reviewed and selected the cultural data, most of the work was already done. Each subset of the data was analyzed, with a comparison table being created before finally, the script was written.
Exhibition Creation
All the while, the web environment was being set up to host our exhibition. This followed a typical web development workflow (Eden, 2022), with some initial wireframes being designed before implementing the designs into a working environment. The final exhibition was developed using WordPress and hosted on Digital Oceans’ Cloudways infrastructure. Though UI/UX design wasn’t a requirement of the assignment, we opted to create the website in the style of a ‘full section scroller,’ giving it a ‘storybook’ feel and allowing us to better immerse the viewer into the exhibition and narrative.
Final Data Aggregation and Exhibition Implementation
The final step was to add the content to the website. Each artefact had its featured image downloaded from its respective source and uploaded to the relevant section on the website. As per the copyright adherence outlined on the website, we also copied across each artefact’s relevant metadata, providing both citations, and a link for individuals to view the artefact themselves. Finally, the analysis was added, the content was proof-read and the site was tested on a handful of screen resolutions.
Discussion
Our final prototype can be found here, in the form of a digital exhibition. As mentioned, the website itself contains the various cultural artefacts, accompanied by relevant analysis and some overarching trends. While the results aren’t entirely conclusive, it does still manage to provide us with some unique insights into Canberra’s lifestyle development.
Unsurprisingly enough, Canberra’s proposed lifestyle has undergone significant transformations over the past century. Nearly every aspect of Canberra’s lifestyle differs from its original vision, with only a handful of remnants remaining. While we can’t outline every trend deduced here (that’s what the exhibition is for), we can discuss some notable takeaways.
Most apparent regards Canberra’s ongoing commitment to the promotion of its environmental and educational offerings. This is something that, going into the research, we predicted to shift greatly, however a number of their original intentions still ring through in modern campaigns and promotional material.
The decline of utopian idealism also reigns true. Comparing contemporary tourism strategies with the original visions of the city offers a fascinating insight into not only the cultural development of Canberra but prompts numerous other questions – what has become of Canberra and how has it deviated so far from its original course? Moreover, what does this tell us about pre-planned cities – and what measures could be put in place to avoid this. Finally, as suggested by Pojani (2022) are pre-planned, ‘trophy cities’ always bound to fail? Though our research on its own doesn’t have the capacity to answer these questions, we believe it does an incredible job at providing a foundation to facilitate these discussions, and further the understanding of Canberra’s history, development, and lifestyle.
Lastly, our project underscores the significance of cultural data and the important role it has in modern research. While quantitative analysis will always remain a dominant force, our work proves that not everything can be deduced from solely numerical data. Rather, it emphasizes that cultural artefacts, close reading, and qualitative analysis are integral to providing a comprehensive overview of any topic – and that it should not be forgone or put to the wayside.
Evaluation
Overall, we believe our project was partially successful. We were able to effectively answer our research question and have produced a working prototype that accurately reflects that of an established Digital Humanities project. However, between time and scope limitations, ineffective project management and the fact that this was our first time working in the Digital Humanities space, there is definitely room for improvement.
What Worked Well
Our project demonstrated several notable strengths, with one of the most significant being our choice of subject matter. Our project’s implementation of cultural data driven lifestyle analysis set us apart from many other similar projects – not only providing a fresh outlook on Canberra (and a hook to engage readers) but an added interest to the project.
The implementation of the data aggregation frameworks outlined earlier also proved surprisingly successful. These frameworks ensured that our project wasn’t overly ambitious, allowing us to obtain a definitive answer to our research question rather than coming up empty-handed.
Finally, the choice to present our analysis in an exhibition style proved quite effective, enabling us to create a piece of media that was engaging and easily accessible to a wide audience. Its implementation into the website only furthered this. Not only did the website feel polished, but it was able to effectively tell an interactive and compelling story, all while ensuring the cultural data was at the heart of the exhibit.
Even Better If
Despite our best efforts, the project was far from flawless. Several internal and external factors posed significant challenges, and ultimately led to a final project that felt underdeveloped.
The large scope and scale of the project, coupled with the limited timeframe created many difficulties. The constraints of the assignment meant the time allocated to the project was limited – meaning our data collection, analysis and implementation all felt incomplete to an extent. In a similar vein, we also failed to implement any proper project management frameworks, resulting in a considerable amount of time wasted on unnecessary or repetitive tasks.
We also encountered difficulties related to the data used within the project. A substantial portion of our work relied on ephemera material from the NLA – however much of this was unable to be sourced. Additionally finding relevant data proved challenging, with limited search filters at our disposal. In hindsight, developing and implementing an algorithm to locate these sources efficiently would have not only made our lives easier, but ensured the sources were reliable and cohesive.
Overall, while the project didn’t completely fall flat of its goal, by addressing some of these issues we believe we could have answered our research question in a more refined and conclusive way.
Future Opportunities
Looking ahead, our project presents several promising opportunities. Our dataset truly only scratches the surface when it comes to Canberra’s history with city marketing. Were the dataset continued to be expanded and evaluated, we believe our project has the potential to contribute to a richer understanding of Canberra’s history. Similarly, the implementation of statistical analysis and a refined geocriticism framework (Westphal & Tally Jr, 2007) could help facilitate precise comparisons between both Canberra and itself, and its relationship with other cities. Regardless, we believe our project not only showcases the huge possibilities of this area of research but has the potential to inspire future projects to tackle it with an enhanced depth.
Conclusion
Overall “In Canberra’s Eyes” has not only provided us with a unique insight into the evolution of Canberra’s self-presentation and lifestyle, but with a valuable introduction to the field of Digital Humanities as a whole. Although there’s room for improvement, we believe our project has met its goal – to showcase the difference between Canberra’s original lifestyle vision and modernity. Between exposing the utopian idealism that has plagued Canberra since its inception to highlighting the cities various approaches to lifestyle marketing over the years, “In Canberra’s Eyes” has offered us with a fresh perspective on our city’s history, it’s development over time, and the incredible intricacies of lifestyle marketing.
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