Locative Media:
City Poems Project
Part of CEDaR’s locative media project series and developed in collaboration with Vancouver Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam, the City Poems app combines augmented reality and geolocation technology with poetry, offering an immersive experience of Vancouver's places and poems with poets like Joy Kogawa and Debra Sparrow.
Principal Investigators
David Gaertner, Daisy Rosenblum
Vancouver Poet Laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam, Centre for Digital Media (CDM), CTLT Indigenous Initiatives
Partners
Dante Cerron, Oliva Chen, Jonathan Hennessey, Helen He, Mohsen Movahedi, Karla Ssewakiryanga
Project Team
Centre for Digital MEdia Teams
Debra Sparrow, Donna Seto, Sadhu Binning, Junie Desil, Joy Kogawa, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Alex Leslie, Jimmy Wang
Poets
The City Poems app, created in collaboration with Vancouver's Poet Laureate, Fiona Tinwei Lam, invites users to immerse themselves “inside the stories” of Vancouver's places and poems, reimagining conventional mapping and wayfinding through augmented reality. Built upon the locative media platform developed at CEDaR Space, the app seamlessly bridges geography, language, and technology. It encourages users to navigate without the comfort of a mobile map, obligating users pay close attention to their surroundings. The poems prompt awareness of the relationship between specific Vancouver locations and the social dynamics they hold, promoting deeper engagement with the City's rich cultural and ecological history through the lens of poetry and technology.
The City Poems Project in its final phase of development, due for release in early 2026.
Navigator uses geolocation data to point user to where content will be unlocked. It uses meteorological data to change aspects of the design.
The poem list lets users access the poem media again, and shows them which poems haven’t been unlocked.
Each poem has a collection of associated media, including voice recordings and videos made by the poems as well as a poet bio and the formatted poem itself.
What is locative Media?
Developed in partnership with the Emerging Media Lab and the Centre for Digital Media, our locative media platform is designed to provide location-triggered access to audio, video, and other content, using geographic information to connect app users to the land. These technologies ask users to pay more attention to where they are, prompting active and embodied engagement with place, with others, and with oneself.
Our locative platform is intended to be a versatile template application, adaptable to a range of community contexts and needs. See the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ street signs project for another application.
The platform interface uses Unity AR (Augmented Reality) to locate media in geographic locations while the backend draws content from a Drupal database, all of which which compiles to a native mobile application.
A first look at the City Poems App—an early demo created and narrated by Jonathan Hennessey that brings place, sound, and poetry together.
Output
A publicly accessible mobile app, the City Poems app will be available for free on iOS and Android platforms. The app aims to engage students, educators, and the general public in an interactive poetic experience deeply grounded in Vancouver's complex geographical, cultural, and ecological tapestry.
App content includes high-quality audio recordings of participating poets, bespoke visual interpretations unique to each poem, and video.
Technical documentation includes a thorough dossier explaining the underlying technology, programming, and methodologies, enhancing the academic value and replicability of the project. The project is open source, with code hosted on CEDaR’s GitHub repository, making it accessible for adaptation.
Impact
By immersing users in site-specific poems, we aim to deepen the public's understanding of the rich tapestry of histories and communities that have shaped the territories currently known as British Columbia.
The City Poems Project resides at the intersection of storytelling and language, geography and technology. City Poems acts as a model for how to combine educational research, technological advancements, and ethical principles into an interactive educational tool, emphasizing transformative learning, public relevance, and knowledge exchange as its key objectives.