Daejeon, July 27–31
In 1921, Route 1, Beijing’s first tram, inaugurated the city’s public-transport system, which has accompanied its transformation from imperial capital to global metropolis. The bus network is both urban infrastructure and a “memory container” for residents’ movements and social relations: vehicle types, route and stop names, and ticket designs encode local symbols and have become markers of urban memory. Yet these memories are scattered across museums, private collections and individual reminiscences, fragmented and at risk of decay and intergenerational forgetting. Digital-humanities methods are therefore needed to reconstruct the system’s spatio-temporal logic and provide new paradigms for preserving Beijing’s bus memory.
Figure 1: Examples of Archival Resources on Beijing’s Bus System
Based on this, the study takes the century-long bus system as its medium and an interactive website as its interface, exploring how spatio-temporal reconstruction and multimodal storytelling can preserve and revitalise urban memory.
Digital-humanities research stresses multimodal data, semantic linking and spatio-temporal visualisation for preserving and reinterpreting cultural heritage (Hyvönen et al., 2021; Spreafico et al., 2023), providing a useful framework for the construction and integration of bus-related resources (Earley-Spadoni, 2017). Urban-memory research links collective memory with urban space, social identity and cultural transmission (K'oyoo & Breed, 2024; Asur et al., 2022). It increasingly draws on digital-humanities techniques—knowledge graphs, digital models and social-media analytics (Niu et al., 2020; Ata & Basar, 2023; Qiu et al., 2025).
Public-transport research focuses on optimisation, efficiency and sustainability (Hörcher & Tirachini, 2021; Cats et al., 2025), using multi-agent systems, real-time data and GIS for dynamic management (Horazdovsky et al., 2019) and addressing passenger experience and social equity (Brovarone, 2021; Sipus et al., 2022). Yet digital urban-memory projects still privilege monumental heritage—historic buildings and traditional neighbourhoods—while everyday heritage such as public transport is rarely addressed; by treating buses as a memory carrier, this study activates their narrative potential and excavates memories in vehicles, tickets, routes, stops and personal stories, anchoring urban-memory research in everyday life.
Focusing on Beijing’s bus system, the project moves beyond functionalist views of transport infrastructure and reconceptualises it as a multidimensional “carrier of urban memory.” The network is treated as a medium embedded in the urban fabric and intertwined with citizens’ daily routines. Using a digital-humanities techniques, the project activates this dimension of cultural memory and enables dynamic, interactive interpretation.
Figure 2: Website Architecture of A Century of Beijing Buses
A multidimensional interpretive framework supports the integrated presentation of vehicles, tickets, routes, stops and personal narratives. It traces changes in vehicle forms, examines socio-economic information in ticket design and visualises urban expansion through network and stop evolution, while capturing emotional attachments and social relations generated by everyday encounters with buses. Timelines are linked with GIS maps to relate bus models and ticketing systems to their political-economic contexts and to use evolution of network density to reconstruct, within a spatial-temporal framework, the memories carried by the system.
Narratively, the project replaces linear plots with a multimodal “narrative network.” Personified narrative from the bus's perspective supports affective re-experiencing of history; interactive question-and-answer sessions reveal the cultural symbolism of tickets; and emblematic routes connect different images of Beijing. By foregrounding micro-stories of women drivers, conductors and ordinary residents, it decentralises collective memory. Immersive tasks grounded in historical facts transform users from passive viewers into active explorers. This game-like yet research-based mechanism, termed “participatory heritage interpretation,” enables users to perceive social change and build new connections to cultural memory.
This study’s core value lies in using the bus system as an example to provide a replicable, transferable digital humanities methodology for researching other everyday urban heritage. It demonstrates how to transform everyday infrastructure into interactive digital resources through a multidimensional interpretive framework, linking physical changes with social history and creating dynamic, resonant memories.
This research offers a comprehensive framework for the digital preservation of Beijing’s century-old bus system. By integrating spatiotemporal reconstruction and multimodal narratives, it transforms static archives into interactive memory resources, redefining the cultural memory value of Beijing buses.
References
Aşur, F., Akpinar Kulekci, E., & Perihan, M. (2022). The role of urban landscapes in the formation of urban identity and urban memory relations: the case of Van/Turkey. Planning Perspectives, 37(4), 841-857.
Ata, İ. A., & Başar, M. E. (2023). Application of digital urban memory transmission model for sustainability of cultural heritage. ICONARP International Journal of Architecture and Planning, 11(1), 271-292.
Cats, O., Gkiotsalitis, K., & Schöbel, A. (2025). 50 years of Operations Research in public transport. EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics, 100160.
Earley-Spadoni, T. (2017). Spatial history, deep mapping and digital storytelling: archaeology's future imagined through an engagement with the digital humanities. Journal of Archaeological Science, 84, 95-102.
HORAŽĎOVSKÝ, P., KOZHEVNIKOV, S., & SVÍTEK, M. (2019, May). Dynamic public transport in smart city using multi-agent system. In 2019 Smart City Symposium Prague (SCSP) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
Hörcher, D., & Tirachini, A. (2021). A review of public transport economics. Economics of transportation, 25, 100196.
Koho, M., Ikkala, E., Leskinen, P., Tamper, M., Tuominen, J., & Hyvönen, E. (2021). WarSampo knowledge graph: Finland in the second world war as linked open data. Semantic Web, 12(2), 265-278.
K'oyoo, E., & Breed, C. (2024). Urban memory and identity weighed against economic investment in urban renewal projects: A case of Kisumu City, Kenya. Acta Structilia, 31(1), 84-119.
Niu, L., Liu, L., Gao, C., & Jia, X. (2020). Building a memory map to reconstruct an urban memory: the case of the Beijing city gates. Library Trends, 69(1), 76-100.
Qiu, B., Song, P., Tao, X., Zhou, Q., & Zhang, F. (2025). Construction of urban collective memory maps based on social media data: a case study of Nanjing, China. npj Heritage Science, 13(1), 259.
Šipuš, D., Abramović, B., & Jakovčić, M. (2022). Defining equity criteria for determining fare zones in integrated passenger transport. Journal of advanced transportation, 2022(1), 4062132.
Spreafico, A., Chiabrando, F., & Della Coletta, C. (2023). 3D WebGIS Applications for Digital Humanities Studies: The Turin 1911 Project. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 48, 1501-1508.
Vitale Brovarone, E. (2021). Design as if bus stops mattered: exploring the potential role of public transport stops in the urban environment. Urban Design International, 26(1), 82-96.