JCIT_2016_127_Revision 2_V0 (1).pdf




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Introduction 
 

For well over a century, Seattle’s Lake Union has been a site of rapid change. It has undergone 
successive waves of urban development and redevelopment since the mid-1800s, from 
colonization, deindustrialization, and the construction of Interstate 5, to the development of 
biotechnology campuses in the south and the University of Washington in the northeast. In 
recent decades, the Lake and the many neighborhoods that ring its shores have undergone an 
immense transformation, driven by the region’s burgeoning tech industry. Thus, for generations 
now, Lake Union has been at the geographic and symbolic center of urban growth and local 
conceptions of place, a hydrological backdrop to the actors and political processes entangled in 
such transformations. The questions of who controls growth, who makes decisions, and who 
has a say in this process are pertinent for understanding the future of Lake Union and Seattle.  
 
The task of the Northlake Collective—six graduate students from geography, history, social 
work, and the built environment involved in the larger Lake Union Lab at the University of 
Washington—was to conduct an exploratory placed-based investigation of a slice of the city 
adjacent to Lake Union that ultimately might engage the public through a digital humanities 
portal. The broader goal of the Northlake Collective and the current paper is to address how 
we, as a team of emerging scholars, understand and investigate ‘cities’ in the current century as 
both networked at the global scale and dynamic places for everyday interactions and processes. 
What emerged from our work is a transdisciplinary framework that proposes to enrich 
grounded urban theory and counter urban redevelopment marketed for the ‘good of all.’  
 
The Northlake Collective began as a way of exploring more complex urban narratives beyond or 
between disciplinary frameworks and connecting these new narratives with university and 
community partners. Urbanists from a variety of disciplines have argued that city management 
and planning in the 21st century are oriented towards a city’s place in the global hierarchy, 
producing a metanarrative of ‘the city in crisis’ that competes on a global scale for finite capital 
resources and ideal urban dwellers. This manufactured ‘urban-crisis’ discourse is used to justify 
apolitical management by expert urban managers, who might argue that the issues are too 
pressing and concerns too imminent for a democratic process (Davidson and Iveson 2015b; 
Elwood and Lawson 2013; Marcuse 2015; Rizzo and Galanakis, 2015). The city in crisis often 
legitimizes urban renewal for the ‘good of all’ by elites including mobile urban policies (Davies 
and Msengana-Ndlela 2015; Jacobs 2012), place branding and waterfront renewal (Airas, et al. 
2015), and the competition for managerial firms (Davidson and Iveson 2015b). Decision-making 
processes in the entrepreneurial/technologically managed city create a disconnect between the 
image of the city at the global scale and that in local practice (Falahat 2014; Foo, Martin, Wool, 
and Polsky 2014), thus marginalizing and disenfranchising people of color, the poor, and 
homeless (Bose 2015). One approach to countering this metanarrative is careful attention to 
the ways scholars represent and write about cities (Marcuse 2015), employing an engaged and 



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critical social science perspective (Gleeson, 2014), and turning towards a more local 
ethnographic approach that takes into account relational processes and development at the 
city scale (Davidson and Iveson 2015a; Jacobs 2012; Robinson 2008; Secor, 2013), as well as 
complex intertwined histories (Hayden 1995; Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2011; Massey 
2005).  
 
The epistemological difficulties with investigating urban processes are ill-served by isolated 
disciplinary approaches, and so urbanists from a variety of disciplines have called for a thematic 
and cross-disciplinary approach to cultivate a more holistic view of urban concerns over a 
singular, hegemonic metanarrative (Anderson, et al. 2013; Davies 2015; Manzo and Perkins 
2006; Ramadier 2004; Rizzo and Galanakis 2015). Our paper follows from these critical concerns 
about contemporary cities, as well as the numerous calls for greater collaboration within urban 
research, whether between or across disciplines (Petts, et al. 2008; Ramadier 2004; Rizzo and 
Galanakis 2015). This has meant focusing on a technology (Amorim, et al. 2014) or artistic tool 
(Rizzo and Galanakis 2015) that crosses and mediates multiple disciplines and allows for a 
coming-together of multiple actors and stakeholders within a given urban locale to illustrate 
multiple histories, identify concerns, and develop solutions. Although these technological tools 
are useful mediating devices, they are not a panacea to the challenges of interdisciplinary 
collaboration or public engagement. Indeed, they produce their own particular challenges that 
we will discuss in more detail throughout the article. 
 
As a transdisciplinary research team, our approach was largely exploratory: to engage with a 
local site by employing the sorts of methods, data sources, and research products possible 
given the particular makeup and manifestation of our team. Thus, in research and through this 
paper, we endeavored to put aside existing disciplinary methods and collectively construct a 
uniquely urban epistemological framework to explore the ongoing challenges of urbanism. We 
draw from previous scholarship, particularly Rizzo and Galanakis’ (2015) notion of 
Transdisciplinary Urbanism as a methodological framework that allows for the study of 
“uncertainty, chance and open-endedness, and to transparently renegotiate power structures 
in urban space” (p. 36) by engaging various urban actors, theories, and practices. The paradoxes 
and complexity inherent to understanding the ‘city’ and how to address these concerns led us 
to develop a framework that might enrich grounded urban theory through three ‘enabling 
constraints’: place, technology and public (see Figure 1).  
 
Constraints, in this undertaking, are reconceptualized with a positive and productive capacity, 
as opposed to a solely prescriptive and confining function (Hayles 2001; Introna 2011; 
McDonnell 2011). Place, technology, and public, formulated as ‘enabling constraints,’ set limits 
to our approach of the complexity of the city, while also opening up space for possibilities in 
that approach. Place provided a certain malleability as a loosely bounded location that was also 
subjectively experienced, leading us to questions of scale, methods, and our epistemological 



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rendering of place as geographically constrained. Born-digital, our project saw technology or 
digital scholarship as a tool and end product for the power of visual argumentation that could 
be harnessed more fully in cross-disciplinary work—although those same productivities also 
imposed operational and typological limits. Finally, public or public scholarship offered 
accessibility to the city and a common space for collaboration both within and beyond the 
academy, while also raising the challenge of the moral imperative of public engagement and 
constituting the ‘public’ itself. These affordances allowed us to deepen our work and produced 
the context for our research.  

 
Figure 1: Enabling constraints and interstitial questions 
 
At the intersections of these enabling constraints emerged questions regarding how issues of 
place, technology, and the public might affect one another (see Figure 1). Reflecting on this 
particular set of challenges and their interrelatedness allowed us to identify the constituent 
elements of our collaboration and how these might lead to more meaningful research on cities. 
These challenges included our privileged position within a prominent, long-established 
university and our use of digital technologies, both of which undermined attempts at non-
expert knowledge production. The limitations of our attempts at transdisciplinary urbanism, as 
well as our accomplishments, shed light on both the difficulties and the possibilities of novel 
research structures and approaches. Following a brief narrative of our collaborative process, 
the remainder of the paper is organized around discussion of each of the three enabling 
constraints, which combine to structure our epistemological framework for studying urbanism. 



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We conclude by highlighting several dilemmas of transdisciplinary collaboration attempting to 
engage place, technology, and the public in order to better represent contemporary cities. 
 
Origins and objectives of Lake Union Laboratory, a transdisciplinary urban research collective  
 
The Lake Union Laboratory (LULab) is a research collective at the University of Washington 
founded to not only investigate the urban but to do so in a way that consciously incorporates 
diverse disciplinary perspectives, methodologies, and ways of knowing using digital and public 
platforms. LULab focused on Lake Union and its surrounding neighborhoods because the Lake 
has long served as a bellwether for urban growth and change:  

Lake Union is at once emblematic of and somewhat divergent from several key trends in 
contemporary urbanization. In ways that are resonant with similar experiences in 
countless other cities nationally and globally, the communities surrounding Lake Union 
have undergone several decades of post-industrial reinvention. At the same time, 
however, Lake Union offers a remarkable case in which a very particular combination of 
technological enterprises—not the usual suspects in large-scale urban redevelopment—
have converged to channel huge amounts of capital into a large project of creative 
destruction and renewal in a world-class urban core. Both of these realities are tightly 
bound to shifts in the structure of the global economy that have been unfolding for 
decades, and the outcomes for Lake Union could be informative for future urban 
planning and policy debates more broadly. (Lake Union Lab, 2013)  
 

Consisting of four core faculty members and a total of six graduate student researchers 
representing the College of the Built Environment, School of Social Work, and Departments of 
Geography and History, LULab primarily examines social, environmental, economic, and 
technological dynamics surrounding Lake Union, a freshwater lake located entirely within the 
city limits. Since 2013, the work of LULab has included a diverse array of undergraduate and 
graduate pedagogical projects, faculty research, and graduate student research projects.1 This 
paper will focus specifically on the contributions of the Northlake Collective, which included a 
series of research projects centered on the stretch of land along the north shore of Lake Union. 
As graduate students involved in LULab, we have spent the last three years exploring a small 
slice of Seattle’s rapidly changing urban landscape. Committed to place-based inquiry and 
public scholarship, we combined historical and socio-spatial ways of knowing in an effort to 
rethink how we produce and publicize knowledge about the city and urbanism. Our primary 

                                                           
1 At this time, LULab is predominately located within the University, and has not expanded its focus or 
reach to include large numbers of non-academic collaborators. However, a related project, Urban@UW, 
which grew out of the initial LULab project, prioritizes non-academic collaboration as key to the study 
and practice of urbanism at the University of Washington (see http://urban.uw.edu/). 



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goals throughout this project were to analyze and represent the complexity of urban spaces 
and engage in cross-campus collaboration to produce a proof-of-concept digital humanities 
project, while showcasing the value of transdisciplinary inquiry.  
 
After two years of working together, our effort resulted in three major components: 1) an 
online exhibit documenting a sensory exploration of Northlake, 2) a microhistory of a 
neighborhood apartment building, and 3) an online digital mapping portal that compiled and 
displayed several data-driven research projects, ranging from an investigation into Works 
Progress Administration-era housing designations to a study of mid-20th century Urban Renewal 
projects. Additional work was done exploring laundries, census data, and ongoing development 
projects. Our choice of subject matter tilted heavily towards the social sciences and humanities, 
reflecting the disciplinary fields and research interests of the Collective’s members. It is also an 
indication of our desire to work at multiple scales and temporalities. 
 
The resulting public digital humanities project represents Northlake along the dimensions of 
time, place, and social life. An in-progress digital interactive map, the capstone of the Northlake 
Collective, brings together the sensory exploration of place and attempts at defining the ‘place’ 
Northlake with disciplinary projects highlighting urban change across four eras (the Progressive 
Era, the New Deal Era, the Urban Renewal Era, and the Contemporary Era), all crosscut by 
broad social, political, economic, and ecological themes. The final public-facing product ideally 
will represent a unique approach to the study of cities in the 21st century, providing a resource 
for urban communities and stakeholders seeking to counter uncritical development narratives.  
 
Towards enabling constraints in transdisciplinary urban research 
 
Enabling constraints are those elements, material or conceptual, that function within a system 
or context to delimit the space of possibilities while simultaneously allowing productivity and 
creativity precisely by that delimitation (Bullock and Buckley 2009; Hayles 2001; Introna 2011; 
Shogan 2002). Enabling constraints are “necessary condition(s) for complex emergence” (Davis, 
et al. 2015: 219), and thus particularly relevant for complex systems, such as the city and 
collaborative research of it. The positive, productive dimension of constraint develops out of 
complexity theory in evolutionary biology (Hayles 2001: 145) and finds relevance in several 
fields, including art and architecture, cognition, communication, and philosophical inquiry. In 
evolutionary biology, constraints play a positive role in the development of organisms by 
bounding physical environments and creating feedback loops that allow only the most viable 
systems to emerge (Hayles 2001: 155). In creative fields, designers impose upon themselves 
enabling constraints—thematic, aesthetic, and material as space, tools, and materiality—to 
prompt a potential for creativity but also to provide an internal coherence in their media and 
discipline to their process (Hallam, et al. 2014; McDonnell 2011). Meanwhile, philosophical 
inquiry considers the conceptual dimension. Enabling constraints, as considered by Butler 



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(1997) and then Introna (2011), are used to understand agency: actors “operat(e) within a field 
of enabling constraints (or encodings) at the outset,” (Butler 1997: 16), where constraints are 
norms- or rules-based, but are also insecure and thus enable revision and transformation. 
Enabling constraints as a concept has been meaningfully applied in various fields, although only 
with nascent inroads in current literature. 
 
In our own transdisciplinary inquiry into the urban, enabling constraints form a fulcrum around 
which revolve place, technology and public, extending both material and conceptual qualities 
that open up space for possibility and creativity while delimiting capacities. Place emerged early 
on as a means of opening and bounding to develop our group purpose and project, the sites of 
our inquiry, and methodologies. The use of technology and digital scholarship, meanwhile, 
offered a platform to mediate transdisciplinary perspectives and facilitate the public aspect of 
the work. On the other hand, our iterative, collaborative process of producing a publically 
accessible interface was restricted somewhat by the obligation to consider representational 
and technical questions during data collection and production phases. Finally, the notion of 
public scholarship held promise for advancing academic research beyond the confines of 
campus, though the enterprise of genuinely engaging public stakeholders remained limited by 
conceptual challenges and institutional and practical barriers. Our epistemological framework 
for approaching the 21st century city emerges at the intersection of these three constraints 
(see Figure 1), even as each constraint guided the project to practical ‘how’ questions.  
 
Place: An enabling constraint through location, meaning, and methodology 

 
Our place-based work evolved into a significant enabling constraint in these three ways: the 
process of seeking out place in constructing our group purpose and project; the site of our 
inquiry; and the methods from which we drew to explore, document, and publicize our findings. 
As we began to document the shifting character of a small slice of urban Seattle, we found that 
grounding our project in place had both expected and unexpected effects on the nature of our 
findings. The transdisciplinarity of the work, the availability of specific technologies, and the 
desire to engage various publics likewise had profound impacts on our understanding of the 
place under study. Through the structure afforded by LULab, we sought to explore the 
reciprocal imprint of social, political, and economic processes on Northlake and the ways 
Northlake itself shaped the processes as they occurred in space. Using the transdisciplinary 
structure and born-digital aspects of LULab to query the ways that these large processes 
shaped and were shaped by grounded conditions in Northlake was an intriguing proposition, 
but our group first had to confront how we would approach the study of place.  
 
LULab faculty, in both undergraduate courses and other research projects, were already 
examining neighborhoods around the Lake—in particular South Lake Union, a section of the city 



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experiencing unprecedented growth and speculative investment.2 For our project, we chose to 
focus on Northlake, a less-studied but no less interesting stretch of shoreline located along the 
lake’s north-central boundary. Nestled among more established neighborhoods like Fremont, 
Wallingford, and the University District, Northlake remains relatively undifferentiated. Long a 
bastion of light industry, especially shipbuilding, Northlake has undergone several concurrent 
economic and social shifts in recent years. Both private capital and the public sector have ‘re-
discovered’ the area with investments in the form of condominiums and office space, as well as 
new construction by the University of Washington, which is aggressively seeking to expand its 
campus footprint into Northlake.  
 
Northlake’s relatively low profile immediately interested us, provoking a series of exploratory 
questions focused on the nature of place-specific identity and meaning. Members of the 
Collective were intrigued that an area so centrally located in a city as rapidly changing as Seattle 
remains so little known or investigated. Aside from being the name of a street and a local bar 
(the Northlake Tavern), the place designation itself is only sparingly used. And, in those rare 
cases where ‘Northlake’ is invoked—for example in the signage shown in Figure 2—the name 
seems to label underutilized or peripheral space. The somewhat elusive character of Northlake 
proved to be appealing in these formative stages because it allowed each of us to approach the 
area with few preconceptions. At this stage of the project, we were still in a fully exploratory 
mode, having not yet decided on a particular medium or tool for the eventual display of our 
findings.  
 
As we began our initial inquiry into Northlake, it was clear that it, in fact, possessed a rich 
history, driving Seattle’s development and transition at key moments. From its early role as a 
site of trade and commerce, to later uses as a distribution hub for regional extractive industries, 
including a large-scale coal gasification plant, to the remediation and adaptation of that plant 
into a popular city park, Northlake has been the site of important economic, social and 
environmental shifts emblematic of larger forces shaping Seattle and beyond (Klingle 2007; 
Morrill 2013; Sanders 2010; Thrush 2007). The University of Washington has become a key 
player in Seattle’s urban development surrounding Lake Union, particularly in the realm of 
biotechnology and life science research, which helped identify Seattle as a ‘curative city’ 
(Sparke 2011). With the University of Washington’s Seattle campus expanding from the east to 
meet growing capacity needs,3 and technology companies like Adobe and Tableau establishing 
campuses on its western edges, Northlake appears to be on the cusp of additional 

                                                           
2 For more about Seattle’s recent tech boom, see Balk, G. “Seattle’s population boom approaching Gold Rush 
numbers,” Seattle Times, September 13, 2015. http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattles-
population-boom-approaching-gold-rush-numbers/ 
3See University of Washington Master Plan Seattle Campus, Semi-Annual Report, March 2008: 
http://www.washington.edu/community/files/2008/03/UW-Semi-Annual-Report-03-08.pdf 



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transformations, making it a productive location for place-based transdisciplinary inquiry into 
the larger patterns and processes of urbanism.   

 

 
Figure 2: “The elusive character of Northlake,” as depicted by waterfront park signage lacking 

an obvious signified point of reference 
 
Ultimately, we drew from an understanding of place as simultaneously a Cartesian entity, a 
marked boundary around a specific locality, and a subjective experience tied to particular 
localities (Hayden 1995). We explored Northlake through the ‘coming togetherness’ of multiple 
histories and experiences, mindful of the way a particular locality is created through relational 
processes with other times and places (Massey 2005). Our approach to Northlake was not as an 
inert or known entity but rather as the ‘raw material’ through which creative social practices 
emerge and are reproduced (Bondi 2005; Bourdieu 1990; de Certeau 1984; Cresswell 2002, 
2004; Massey 1984, 2005; Soja 1996). Moreover, we were conscious that our work impacted 
the place itself: through the study of Northlake, we were among those producing knowledge of 
the city and, perhaps unintentionally, involved in recreating dichotomies between an engaged 
academic, expert knowledge-making collective and residents of the places under study. 
 
The transdisciplinary production of place-based knowledge is critical in 21st century cities for 
creating narratives outside of urban redevelopment and city branding (Gibson 2005). Davidson 
and Iveson (2015a) call for a view on cities that would enable more useful place-based politics 
that are relevant to urban dwellers but also extend beyond the city. In the effort to reinvigorate 



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urban politics, Kurt Iveson (1998, 2000) and Andrew Kirby (2013) have argued that the inclusion 
of difference in urban planning is not found in making a plan that vacates conflict from public 
spaces, or planners and designers creating what constitutes ‘good’ urbanism; rather, inclusion 
in planning means engaging in a dialogue.  
 
A critical question in reinvigorating urban politics and creating more democratic urban planning 
and development is how to inculcate participation and incorporate the voices of urban 
residents.  As we will discuss in greater depth in the technology and public portions of this 
paper, what is at stake in placemaking and urban narratives of place is the engagement, in both 
traditional and web-based forms, of urban actors outside of the academy. New technologies 
that allow for engagement outside of traditional venues such as public meetings or city council 
hearings offer one potential venue for dynamic exchange among various publics, but they are 
also fraught with their own means of exclusion. In our work on Northlake, for example, we 
selected a platform without sufficiently considering how individuals and groups outside of the 
academy might respond (or not) to its modes of presentation and feedback mechanisms.  
 
Working under multiple ways of understanding and operationalizing place required that we 
standardize and equalize our processes at the outset. Rather than artificially constrain our 
inquiry, we decided to let the place itself drive our data collection and analysis. This decision 
resulted in the first completed project of our collective, “Northlake: A Sense of Place.” 
Methodologically, we sought to augment our individual disciplinary traditions by working 
collectively to explore Northlake through our senses. This follows a rich tradition of sensory 
studies, which attempts to contest the so-called “primacy of the visual” (Macnaghten and Urry 
1998) and open up analytical space for the consideration of auditory experiences (Bull 2000), 
olfactory perspectives (Classen et al. 1995), as well as taste and touch to understandings of the 
city. For our project, one student, employing the sense of sight, perused the area to photograph 
‘swatches’ or visual/spatial compositions, sifting out textures, colors, patterns, vistas and 
viewsheds that, in aggregate, could be understood as characteristic of the particularities of the 
place, as simultaneously industrial and natural. Then, ‘listening hard’ to Northlake led another 
student to novel and surprising soundscapes, capturing ambient freeway noise, ducks in the 
water, and other exemplars of the sonic environment. Appealing to the sense of touch, 
meanwhile, one student explored the various textures of Northlake, revealing simultaneously 
the cold concrete and natural softness of place. Finally, in search of taste, one student was 
drawn to social hubs, as reflecting forms of taste or distinctions that were also matters of socio-
cultural positions: a pizza joint with a long history of recipes and gathering; a church that 
offered community Sunday lunch; and a coffee shop representing an ‘up-and-coming’ side of 
Northlake. Following recent studies on urbanism, senses can emerge as salient in shaping the 
experience of the city, specifically in facilitating academic sensitivity to future urban 
vulnerabilities and mediating relations between ‘self and society’ and ‘idea and object’ (Adams 
and Guy 2007; Bull et al 2006: 5; Doherty 2012).  



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Figure 3: Shifting sites of place-based inquiry over the course of the project timeline 
 
The decision to ground our study on a small area of the city proved foundational to the type of 
transdisciplinary work we accomplished. It allowed us to partake in productive, early 
conversations about both the nature of our investigations and our group itself. However, this 
choice also led to a further engagement with questions surrounding the proper scale of our 
inquiry, an ongoing dialogue that shaped the contours of the project.  
 
As we continued, the size of the sites within ‘Northlake’ expanded or contracted depending on 
the methods of engagement we preferred as well as the available primary source materials (see 
Figure 3). We began with a sizable neighborhood, roughly one square mile, before whittling the 
area of inquiry down to more easily accommodate our sensory exploration. We were mindful, 
however, of falling into the ‘local trap’ (Born and Purcell 2006; Purcell 2006) by uncritically 
accepting a particular scale as inherently more valuable. Therefore, we attempted to transcend 
a reliance on specific temporal and spatial scales by also considering the global/urban forces 
impacting Northlake over time. For example, by tracing the stories of residents who lived in one 



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particular apartment building, we discovered migration patterns linking Northlake to several 
countries in Scandinavia. Additionally, the occupations of building residents, which were largely 
in extractive industries, like lumber and mining, echoed Seattle’s early twentieth-century 
history as a node for natural resource markets in the American West. Working with common 
sites of inquiry at different times in the project allowed for connections to be made across 
individual contributions, resulting in a coherent exploration of a place that incorporated 
multiple sensory perspectives and ways of knowing.  
 
Technology: A critical methodology and technique of public engagement 

 
Our second enabling constraint, technology, is both a critical tool and an end product. It serves 
as a medium for facilitating transdisciplinary research on the city and as a portal to engage the 
public and academic audiences in rich explorations of place. At stake in this conversation was 
the extent to which digital tools could facilitate knowledge production and knowledge politics 
(Elwood 2006). The use of digital humanities technology offered real potential for 
transdisciplinarity and innovative arguments in a study of place, as well as meaningful and 
accessible connections with the public. However, the field remains relatively fluid, with few 
stable methodological or theoretical boundaries (Alvarado 2012).Technology also put limits on 
the research process and exposed underlying disciplinary assumptions, especially as it related 
to the our individual backgrounds and training in particular tools and methodologies. In this 
way, we experienced firsthand the reality that technology is never neutral, whether in its 
production or its reception.  
 
Our goal in using digital tools was to facilitate the transdisciplinary exploration of 21st century 
cities without falling back on disciplinary divides. Digital humanities provided a common 
ground, since no single discipline represented in our research group could claim ownership of 
digital space, technology, or even visual arguments. By using a common platform, we hoped to 
prevent disciplinary domination of any one facet of knowledge production. Yet, in the end, the 
structure of disciplinary fragmentation in the academy proved difficult to circumvent. Because 
the rich history of Northlake that we were developing spans over 100 years, the final portal 
needed a series of contemporary basemaps to support the narrative we produced for the early 
1900s, 1930s, 1960s, and today. This meant digitizing historical maps in ArcGIS and the 
associated delegation of digital tasks to members who had used this software in the past. 
Ultimately, roles and responsibilities with regard to technology were unevenly distributed, 
falling along disciplinary lines. While we are not arguing that it is antiquated or never useful, a 
disciplinary division of labor can plague interdisciplinary work that seeks to be genuinely 
collaborative (Petts et al. 2008), particularly in our experience with an exploratory, technology-
driven project on cities. Even within the academy, then, technology can alienate by either 
compelling or discouraging involvement dependent on one’s preexisting expertise. This echoes 
ongoing debates in digital humanities more generally surrounding how best to engage the 



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“unskilled” in the initial development and later use of various software platforms, especially 
when the long-term stability of those platforms remains unknown (Edwards 2012).  
 
Outside of LULab itself, the disciplinary structure of the university has long been considered an 
impediment to the development and execution of interdisciplinary projects (Petts et al. 2008). 
Our account parallels the woes of previous scholars about the hard-wiring of research 
organizations and support, specifically how funding structures, existing time commitments, and 
departmental allegiances serve as insidious barriers to cross-disciplinarity (Petts et al. 2008). 
Particular to the use of technology and the digital humanities, practical issues of funding 
streams and ownership of the physical server created several obstacles. Space to host the 
Omeka instances and maps, for instance, created real problems for transdisciplinary 
collaboration. The material space our data and visual arguments needed, as well as the 
emergent problem of connecting data and instances across servers, proved challenging and 
time consuming.4 These complications emerge from trying to fit a transdisciplinary research 
group into the material institutional framework of a disciplinary university, or how to fit one 
ideological project into the material form of another.  
 
The push to produce a public portal as end product provided potential for new and innovative 
ways of approaching the city. Access to technology that can be used to create legible ‘needs 
narratives’—thus addressing the unequal distribution of power between residents, community 
organizations, and urban managers and developers (Elwood 2006; Harwood 2007; Roy 2015)—
was a significant driving factor for producing a digital humanities product. Decisions regarding 
technology drew out issues of representation, as elaborated in the next section on public. 
Neither solely ends nor means, digital tools in urban collaborative research are intended to 
question and, potentially, to overcome metanarratives of urban development by dispersing 
control of that narrative and un-stabling any one narrative’s ‘truth’ or permanence. Technology, 
for collaborative urban research, becomes more fully enabling when we consider its power for 
orienting researchers to the needs narratives of urban stakeholders (Elwood 2006).  
 
However, that same portal product as potential was also quite constraining. Rather than 
allowing research questions to emerge from the data or using data to answer questions, we 
were repeatedly compelled throughout the research process to consider the form our output 

                                                           
4 The Omeka program runs from individual instances installed on a server. While we explored other online options, 
having a concrete instance on a university-supported server meant we could ensure long-term maintenance of the 
product.  At this time there are at least four instances of Omeka (the central research instance and several 
teaching instances used for individual undergraduate classes) on four different servers that are all connected to 
the LULab project and are meant to come together in the public-facing portal. As we endeavor to produce a 
common portal and set of visual arguments to elucidate a history of place in Northlake and engage with urban 
residents and stakeholders, we have had to copy and transfer instances to new servers due to memory availability 
and shifting funding streams. 



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would take, as well as issues of representation with which it came. The use of images, for 
example, assumed an outsized importance, as did mapping, as users were more likely to engage 
the digital platform vis-à-vis these modalities. Yet, both our selection of photographs and our 
choices of maps proved quite limited. In one instance, we had access to several historical maps 
dating to the 1930s, though our textual research had revealed intriguing stories dating to the 
1920s. Owing to the visual nature of the medium, however, we ultimately decided to return to 
the archives and re-focus on the Depression-era, as that was the time period covered by so 
many of our cartographic resources. Significantly, had we more fully engaged the public in this 
stage of the project, we might have located more diverse sources, including family 
photographs, oral interviews, and neighborhood publications.  
 
From the outset, the LULab group has had to consider whether the final product/digital portal 
would be an open access information dump (where stakeholders can access raw data, similar to 
the city GIS archives) or a curated narrative that links the historical phases of development 
around Lake Union. The former offers the potential for users to create their own projects and 
initiatives, while offering input on what data should be gathered and shared, whereas the latter 
could incorporate writings, feedback, oral histories, and more from residents, workers, and 
other interested parties. Additionally, the latter could engage the technical knowledge of users, 
who might have expertise in programming beyond that of the Collective’s members. Both 
options, we hoped, would allow the project to have an impact, however modest, on Seattle’s 
rapidly changing urban landscape. While this influence would likely be centered on awareness 
and appreciation rather than concrete policy shifts, it nonetheless might capture the attention 
and imagination of community members. During moments of rapid changes in the urban 
landscape, it can be argued that even marking and memorializing what came before has 
political meaning beyond mere sentimentality (Till 2012).  
 
Like any web-based product, each approach also necessitates consideration of long-term site 
management. As graduate students, our ability to maintain an open access site is limited, 
though this might also encourage more engaged participation from non-university participants. 
This still unresolved tension over final product continues to be a challenge as the portal moves 
forward. 
 
As an exploratory project, focusing our efforts through the Omeka platform was useful. Its 
origins as a content management tool specifically designed to aid in curation allowed us to 
collect and organize a range of seemingly disparate items and artifacts. However, our work 
being place-based and exploratory, we started with no explicit research questions or clear idea 
of what the final result might be. This ultimately meant that the platform played a more 
determinative role in our investigations than is likely optimal. Quite simply, we lacked extensive 
experience in computer programming, and, as a result, the project was constrained by, and 
oriented towards, the capabilities and limitations of the software.  



14 

 

 
In the end, while we may have gone off course from a traditional approach to research, were 
we documenting a transdisciplinary process or actually working towards a defined end product? 
Each option necessitates different types of organization and accountability, most notably 
whether the technological platform could or should be decided in advance. For better or worse, 
in our case, it seems that the need to have a tangible outcome did, at times, sidetrack the 
transdisciplinary goals of our efforts. Moreover, it limited the space, both actual and figurative, 
for exploring the possibilities of non-expert engagement, as access to the technology created 
barriers for a more widespread user base.  
 
In endeavoring to produce knowledge about 21st century cities and reinvigorate urban politics 
through knowledge production, we were working towards a deliverable that would allow us to 
connect with various publics and other academic communities. The question that persists is 
whether digital technologies currently exist that can at once serve as end products accessible to 
wider audiences and as tools in exploratory research. Moreover, these technologies must also 
be both accessible and rigorous, specific and crosscutting, serving the needs of researchers and 
stakeholders outside the academy. 
 
Public Scholarship: Public engagement as an enabling constraint for urban research  
 
From the formation of the Northlake Collective, we and our faculty mentors envisioned projects 
that would have some sort of public face and audience. The desire to make our work accessible 
grew out of three primary impulses: to democratize access to knowledge about the city; to 
influence interpretations and imaginings of the current and future Lake Union landscape; and 
to demonstrate the possibilities of collaborative, transdisciplinary work for investigating place. 
An important caveat at the outset: throughout the process of working together, impulses 
related to public scholarship frequently guided our discussions and decisions, however, the 
project did not involve formal public participation. That said, the drive to produce public 
scholarship provided us with conceptual and practical direction by opening up possibilities and 
imposing certain limitations. In many ways, as we discuss below, we found issues of the public 
to be the most challenging of our enabling constraints. 
 
The act of doing scholarship in public and in partnership with various publics has garnered 
increasing attention in recent years, especially in applied urban research (Davies and 
Msengana-Ndlela 2015; Hoyt 2013), public history (Weyeneth 2014), place-based education 
(Smith 2002), and web-based platforms (Cohen and Rosenzweig 2005). By engaging the public, 
“the wall between school and community becomes much more permeable and is crossed with 
frequency" (Smith 2002: 593). While the need for public engagement in urban research is well 
established and its application sought after from a range of stakeholders, there remains a need 
for publications that offer greater detail as to the key procedural and conceptual dimensions of 



15 

 

carrying out such work. In our own transdisciplinary foraging for publicly engaged urban 
research, the ‘public’ offered license to go beyond the walls of the ivory tower to the city. 
However, the freedom and excitement of tinkering in the city was quickly arrested by emergent 
conceptual questions concerning the following: (1) how ‘the public’ is constituted in this 
particular instance (i.e., who are we engaging with?), (2) what form(s) of engagement our 
project could/should take (i.e., how are we engaging them?), and (3) the broader potential 
impact of public engagement, including being accountable to communities beyond the 
academy (i.e., why does this matter?). These issues, which inherently crisscross place and 
technology, both pushed and pulled us in new and yet unsettled directions.  
 
Just what constitutes a ‘public’ or ‘publics,’ as well as what ‘scholarship’ is or is not, remains 
hotly debated, as are the rubrics by which such forms of intellectual production should best be 
valued. Place attachment and identities in urban neighborhoods are critical for understanding 
how urban actors—individuals, residents, and communities—behave through organization, 
planning, and development. The production of place and place-based identities through 
everyday practices and experiences re-historicizes actors, entangling and producing place-
based actors (Cresswell 2003; Escobar 2001; Hayden 1995; Trudeau 2006). The debates in our 
own graduate student collective grappled with such issues of defining ‘our’ public(s) and deeply 
informed how we sought out the city and the technology we used for searching. With faces and 
communities in the forefront, we found ourselves drawn to fresh research questions, unfamiliar 
approaches, and new digital platforms for public consumption. Having a public—although yet-
unidentified—so explicitly part of our research buoyed group discussions and research 
activities. Yet, ultimately, our academic institution and its reward systems, deadlines, and 
responsibilities, as well as its bureaucratic mandates and expectations, curtailed 
implementation. Chief amongst these institutional expectations was the location of LULab 
solely within the University and our lack of foresight to include non-expert public input in the 
research team. Although the project was intended to be public-facing, its parameters did not 
allow for public engagement in the knowledge production process. In this way, our work 
perhaps regrettably became more of a “show and tell,” rather than a true “give and take” with 
diverse stakeholders. We join other scholars in viewing the institution as constraining—though 
also sanctioning in other ways—the potential of public engagement in transdisciplinary urban 
research (see Petts et al. 2008).  
 
Second, considering the form of public engagement the project might take raised questions 
surrounding the co-production of scholarship and how technological platforms and venues may 
or may not support co-production with various publics. Emerging as an interstitial question 
between two enabling constraints, the form of our engagement and our intended audience 
depended, to a great extent, on the selection of a particular digital humanities platform. We 
discussed whether the Web would ultimately serve as the sole mechanism for interaction with 
various publics. At one point, we evaluated but, in the end, discarded the possibilities of 



16 

 

creating a pop-up museum in Northlake or distributing hard-copy, interpretive materials to 
local public library branches.  
 
In pursuing a digital portal to facilitate public engagement, we were confronted with the 
question of whether our site would be a highly-curated, but largely one-way, educational 
platform or a dynamic interface driven by user contributions. In an effort to engage the ‘public’ 
enabling constraint of our work and make meaningful connections with urbanites outside of the 
academy, we deliberated centering our efforts on the co-creation of information with various 
users. In this way, we would produce dynamic content but could use a largely static mode of 
delivery, as our use of online tools was largely limited by our training and familiarity with those 
tools. At the time of publish, any Internet user could find or interact with the project’s growing 
suite of materials. Moving forward, we aim to engage these materials in a way that encourages 
public engagement and curation. 
 
The broader impact and accountability to communities beyond the academy is of growing 
concern. The moral imperative of public engagement is tied to urban places (Catungal and 
McCann 2010; Deutsche 1992; Kohn 2004; Low and Smith 2006; McCann 2002; Mitchell 2003; 
Ruddick 1996; Rizzo and Galanakis, 2015; Sennett 1994; Tuan 1988). Urban places are the fabric 
through which urban processes are experienced by, and values communicated to urban 
dwellers, citizens, and political actors (Cresswell 2002, 2003; Hayden 1995; Soja 1980; Tuan 
1988). As such, place attachment, enacted via lived experience and semiotic constructions of 
place, informs how people engage with urban politics and processes through participation, 
political agency, and decision-making (Escobar 2001; Till 2008, 2012; Davies and Msengana-
Ndlela, 2015). Publicly engaged urban research is doubly bound by its progressive potential to 
rewrite more complex urban histories that could counter neoliberal development in 21st 
century cities and by the limitations on community through cooptation and limited access to 
knowledge (Rizzo and Galanakis, 2015). If our work was to have any impact on Seattle’s rapidly 
changing urban landscape, even if that effect was largely one of awareness and appreciation of 
change over time, individuals and groups beyond the University had to be cognizant of its 
existence and, ideally, have a stake in its content.  
 
The promise of publicly engaged urban research presented itself in research design and 
deliberations, but conceptual challenges and institutional and technological barriers soon came 
to cloud the face of the public in the Northlake Collective. The exact form that this engagement 
would take, as well as who the intended audiences might be and how we would be 
accountable, remained largely indeterminate and unresolved. What remains to be determined 
is exactly the shape that such a creation might take, as well as how it would best incorporate 
the many born-digital aspects of our efforts.  
 
Discussion 



17 

 

 
The transdisciplinary concepts of place, technology, and public scholarship emerged as enabling 
constraints from within the context of our particular urban research engagement. We propose 
this tripartition as a framework for exploring the contemporary city via the structure afforded 
by transdisciplinary, born-digital collaborations. The emergent, indeterminate, and productive 
character of these concepts, combined with the practical constraints and interrelationships that 
they bring to bear, suggests that digital research on urban places might mirror the city’s own 
complexities. Rather than view enabling constraints as “a frustrating ‘tyranny’ to be escaped 
wherever possible,” we came to consider them as productive constraints that should be 
“leveraged” (Bullock and Buckley, 2009: 141). Welcoming ambiguity is particularly useful for 
transdisciplinary urbanism (Rizzo and Galanakis 2015); and by embracing and engaging with not 
just the potentials but also the limits of place, technology, and public, we were able to ‘lean 
into’ rather than oppose the paradoxes inherent in investigating the urban. 
  
At the intersection of each pair of these enabling constraints emerged a set of questions (see 
Figure 1). Within the conceptual framework structured by place, technology, and public, these 
interstitial questions directed the project toward more practical concerns. Whereas we initially 
focused on defining how we might engage or confront each enabling constraint, we soon found 
that questions incorporating two or more of these enabling constraints compelled us to 
consider our project in more tangible and less ‘meta’ ways. Thus, the practice of generating 
these interstitial questions was a productive step in moving our project forward. Moreover, it 
challenged the distinctness of place, technology, and public by highlighting inherent overlaps 
and relationships between the concepts. For instance, we found that engagement with 
technology largely determined our research ‘deliverables.’ The pre-built platforms we used 
both facilitated and limited our investigations into urbanism, and the group collectively 
navigated tensions surrounding disciplinary silo-ing and divisions of labor that emerged from 
our chosen technological engagements. Furthermore, the imperative of public-facing work 
shaped the questions we asked and the portals we used to publicize our work. However, our 
construction as a solely academic project located squarely within a university limited other 
forms of engagement with area residents. Thus, we arrived at perhaps the most significant 
takeaway from our project: our set of emergent enabling constraints does not function in 
isolation but, rather, operate as an interrelated, productive unit that, together, raises 
fundamental methodological questions related to subject, site, representation, dissemination, 
and audience. 

The freedom to engage with transdisciplinary methodologies made possible the emergence of 
this tripartite framework. By encouraging the development of new methodological expertise 
amongst the graduate student collective—especially through our project on the sensory 
exploration of Northlake—we arrived at new ways to collectively and transdisciplinarily 
experience and produce knowledge about urban places. Further, because no one discipline 



18 

 

‘owned’ Northlake, and because this set of projects was independent of anyone’s graduate 
research in his or her department, we all felt more open to stepping outside of our comfort 
zones—and, more importantly, outside disciplinary bounds—to formulate this research. As we 
collectively constructed our project to understand and confront thorny urban problems, we 
found that in the absence of disciplinary constraints, the transdisciplinary constraints of place, 
technology, and public engagement provided the necessary contours for our investigation into 
urban processes. This theoretical framework synthesizes our intellectual engagement with 
Northlake, with our research project, and with each other. Our intellectual work prefigures the 
reflective and experiential aspects of our research processes and our development as 
transdisciplinary and urban scholars-in-the-making.5  
 
Our collaborative efforts interrogated conceptions of place within complex urban systems, 
while using shifting geographic boundaries to productively constrain our investigation. As befits 
contemporary investigation into complex urban processes, public engagement and the effort to 
be publicly relevant and accountable to various stakeholders in the areas under study resulted 
in productive moments of transdisciplinary collaboration, as well as individual and disciplinary-
specific engagements with our research area. Most importantly, transdisciplinary 
experimentation, guided by the questions emerging from our tripartite framework, yielded data 
sets from which a narrative of Northlake began to crystallize and new insights into urban 
processes could be generated. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

                                                           
5 These topics are the subject of our forthcoming paper, meant to serve as complement to this theoretical paper, 
in which we deliberate more fully upon the experiential aspects of our collaborative process and its impact on us 
as emerging scholars. 



19 

 

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Highlights

• A theoretical framework is proposed for conducting transdisciplinary urban research
• This is comprised of place, technology, and public as ‘enabling constraints’
• Interrelationships between these dimensions lead to productive research questions