The Urban Jackpot is an installation that blends art and research. It lets citizens uncover local urban stories and contribute their own.
Circulating Urban Stories
The Urban Jackpot enables strangers who haven’t met to have a conversation about the city and exchange urban stories.
The Urban Jackpot features a lightweight application embedded in a refurbished vintage slot machine, equipped with a digital interface. Participants pull the lever to activate a randomized pairing of photo-story cards drawn from two data sources: (1) contemporary observations of Copenhagen submitted by citizens via our Urban Belonging app; and (2) historical images from Copenhagen archives. Participants are then prompted to leave their own stories.
As a travelling installation, deployed in different locations, the Urban Jackpot is designed to circulate stories across neighborhoods and urban publics. Research data often remains an intangible, cloud‑based artifact that participants seldom re‑encounter. Urban Jackpot is a deliberately tactile exercise in data physicalization that reimagines data not as a distant abstraction but as something we can touch, feel, play with, and encounter.
The Urban Jackpot is designed and built by Arshia Eghbali, with David Westergren Broomham.
It is part of the larger Urban Listening Toolkit being developed by Arshia Eghbali, David Westergren Broomham, Martin Trandberg Jensen, and Anders Koed Madsen.
The Urban Jackpot is co-funded by the European Union, through the CULTIGEN (2024-2028) project, and Aalborg University.
Version 1.0 was deployed in June 2026.
