Traveling Circus of Urbanism is a platform for urban narratives that are collected from the world through traveling and dialogues with the citizens of the world. In Lomé, as a collaboration with WoeLab, I was interested in discovering the stories and empirical dataset on/of the streets to highlight the users of the HubCity project by WoeLab. During my stay, I've dedicated my time to face-to-face interviews and photo shooting with (potential) users and people in the neighborhood, as well as conducting participatory surveys. This is how I came up with the HubCitizen project.
the HubCitizen project is like Humans of New York. I spent time photographing people on the streets and highlighted their short stories and their lives alongside their portraits, creating a catalogue of the city’s inhabitants.
I built a website by uding a new CMS system called Helix, which allows us to do a content management easily via Google Drive. It is such a powerful tool to build experiences through Google Drive with little-to-no training required, so that website can be edited and updated easily by anyone at WoeLab even after I leave. I have chosen the vertical column structure for easy view. All the codes are publicly shared and accessible on my Github.
You can watch a summary of what the HubCitizen project is about on the presentation video.
Here is the presentation slide I used during the presentation.
Here are some of the portlait of people I managed to talk to. Most of them kindly invited me in their houses, telling me their stories — what their everyday is like, what they are passionate about, their dreams, their complains.
We've also conducted an area analysis based on survey and interviews, togther with a local urban planner.
To see more portlaits and read their stories, please check out the website.
