Urban life, decoded

KONTEXT is an AI-powered urban intelligence platform that helps you understand how people experience cities. It lets you see the city through the eyes of its people.

You can think of KONTEXT as a form of remote sensing for qualitative data. We call it social sensing. For decades, satellites have looked down on cities and measured what is happening through quantitative data like temperature, air quality, or traffic flows. That view is powerful, no doubt, but it stops at "what" is happening. It cannot explain the "why".

KONTEXT looks at the city from within. It focuses on qualitative data captured in language. Satellites are great, but they can't show why people are angry about a street redesign, or why they love Long Street and ignore Short Street. Those answers live in language, opinions, and everyday experiences.

Although we would love to take credit for being magical, and for turning all that qualitative data into something useful by saying something cool like “Aberto!”, the reality is a lot less glamorous. If you’re looking for magic, you’ll have to head to Hogwarts.

At KONTEXT, we work with more earthly tools. We know a thing or two about people and place, large language models, autonomous systems, sentiment analysis, and trend detection. What comes back from that work are clear, readable summaries of what currently bugs people in your city, surfaced as trends, emerging patterns, risks, and opportunities.

KONTEXT works exclusively with information that people already share publicly and voluntarily. This includes public posts and comments on social platforms, online reviews, forum discussions, news articles, blogs, and public visual content such as image captions.

We do not access private data, personal messages, or paywalled content. Everything the system analyzes is part of the open digital layer of the city. When we speak of a "source", we simply refer to a platform or data feed KONTEXT listens to. This can include social platforms like Reddit or Bluesky, review sites, forums, and news or RSS feeds. Depending on your plan, KONTEXT listens to a different number of sources, typically 3, 6, or 10 or more.

Yes. You have full control over what KONTEXT tracks and analyzes. When you get started, KONTEXT asks you to select your industry. Based on that choice, the platform suggests a set of topics that are commonly relevant for your field, but you can also enter your unique topic that is not covered by our suggestions. You can change, add, or remove topics at any time. As soon as you do, KONTEXT updates the analysis accordingly, so your insights always reflect your current focus. There is no need to set up a new project or start from scratch.

KONTEXT is built for people who make decisions about cities and places, and who need to understand how those places are actually experienced.

That includes people working in governments and municipalities, urban planning and architecture, transport and mobility, real estate and asset management, tourism and destination management, retail, hospitality, and events. It also includes less "obvious" professions such as journalists, who try to make sense of what is happening in cities and why.

What all of our clients have in common is not a specific job description or industry, but questions: How do people really feel about this place? What works, what doesn’t, and where are tensions or opportunities starting to form? And why?

Lorenz, our founder, is a Human Geographer at heart and a Social scientist by training. That background comes with a habit of looking beyond immediate results and considering how systems affect people and society more broadly. For that reason, ethics at KONTEXT are not an afterthought. They have shaped how we design, build, and operate the platform from the very beginning. We apply the same rigor to ethical questions as we do to technical architecture.

Our approach is grounded in four foundational principles. The system is subject to continuous audit. Accountable human oversight is always required. We work exclusively with publicly available data and do not rely on unethical or illegal data scraping practices. And we focus on aggregated patterns rather than individuals, automatically removing personal identifiers along the way.

Our goal is insight into places, not monitoring of people. This distinction matters.

Since you’re exploring KONTEXT, we’ll skip the basics of why qualitative insight matters for good decision-making. We’ll assume that part is already clear.The conversations happening online describe how places and spaces are actually experienced, without prompts, filters, or participation barriers. Compared to traditional methods, combining qualitative insight with computational data analysis techniques allows us to work faster, at greater scale, and with broader representation, using significantly fewer resources.

Traditional qualitative methods such as surveys, interviews, workshops, and focus groups are valuable (and we do not attempt to replace them but rather to complement them), but they come with clear limits. They take time to organize, are expensive to run at scale, and usually capture feedback from a small and often unrepresentative group. By the time results are compiled, they often reflect the a snapshot from the past rather than what is happening now. Because KONTEXT analyzes massive social data stream continuously and at scale, it provides a live, place-based picture of sentiment, patterns, risks, and opportunities across cities and neighborhoods. Insights update as conversations change, making them more timely and more representative than one-off studies.