Amplifying Quiet Voices: Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design at an Urban Scale

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design activities are somewhat limited. In this paper, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a smart city project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising participatory design at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city

The Right to City in the Era of Crowdsourcing

This article explores the meaning and context of crowdsourcing at the municipal scale. In order to legitimately govern, local governments seek feedback and engagement from actors and bodies beyond the state. At the same time, crowdsourcing efforts are increasingly being adopted by entities – public and private – to digitally transform local services and processes. But how do we know what the “the right to the city” (RTTC) means when it comes to meaningful and participatory decision-making? And how do we know if participatory efforts called crowdsourcing—a practice articulated in a 2006 Wired article in the context of the tech sector—when policy ideas are sought at the municipal scale? Grounded in the ideals of Henri Lefebvre’s RTTC, the article brings together typologies of public participation to advance a conceptualization of ‘crowdsourcing’ specific to local governance. Applying this approach to a smart city initiative in Toronto, Canada, I argue that for crowdsourcing to be taken seriously as a means of inclusive and participatory decision-making that seeks to advance the RTTC, it must have connection to governance mechanisms that aim to integrate public perspectives into policy decisions. Where crowdsourcing is disconnected to decision-making processes, it is simply lip service, not meaningful participation

Succeeding with Smart People Initiatives: Difficulties and Preconditions for Smart City Initiatives that Target Citizens

Smart City is a paradigm for the development of urban spaces through the implementation of state-of-the-art ICT. There are two main approaches when developing Smart Cities: top-down and bottom-up. Based on the bottom-up approach, the concepts of Smart People and Smart Communities have emerged as dimensions of the Smart City, advocating for the engagement of citizens in Smart People initiatives. The aim of this research is both to find the types of Smart People initiatives and to identify their difficulties and preconditions for success. However, such initiatives that aim to (1) leverage the citizens intellectually and (2) use citizens as a source of input for ideas and innovation, are understudied. Therefore, this research proposes a concentrated framework of Smart People initiatives from an extensive literature review. On one hand, this framework contributes with a common ground and vocabulary that facilitates the dialogue within and between practitioners and academia. On the other hand, the identification of difficulties and preconditions guides the academia and practitioners in how to successfully account for citizens in the Smart City. From the literature review and the conduct of case studies of five European cities, participation came out as the key difficulty across both types of Smart People initiatives and cases, closely followed by awareness, motivation and complexity

Sociotechnical co-production of planning information : opportunities and limits of crowdsourcing for the geography and planning of bicycle transportation

Urban planners deploy civic technologies to engage publics with digital tools in a relative vacuum of theory, understanding of challenges, or benefits. The issue, Lewis Mumford might have framed, could be of authoritarian and democratic technics—whether the technology contributes more to top-down control or bottom-up understanding. Building from collaborative planning theory, co-production suggests ways people can leverage technologies to build urban solutions with or without professional planners. Empirical research shows that crowdsourcing to address planning questions with digital civic platforms can help fill or mitigate information gaps, including support for bicycling as a safe and comfortable travel mode. However, no research has addressed how crowdsourced information for bicycle planning offers new insights for safety, the geography of participation, or how its social construction impacts its representation of bicycling in a community. A new framework for evaluating co-productive planning is proposed, considering legitimacy, accessibility, social learning, transparency, and representation (LASTR). This dissertation addresses these concerns of safety, geography, and social construction through the LASTR framework using mixed-methods case studies in Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas. Bicycle volumes and street ratings through the crowdsourcing platform, along with geographic information system environmental data, and interviews with thirty-three informants form the basis for evaluating these issues. Viewed from pragmatism and social construction of technology, the social processes of planning and technological developments are intertwined and traced in tandem. The first three chapters frame the problems, build a background in theory, and describe the research questions, planning contexts, and data for analysis. The next three chapters are empirical, evaluating the use of crowdsourced information for bicycle safety, comparing the geography of crowdsourced participation with in-person meetings from both cities’ most recent bicycle planning process, and tracing the sociotechnical representation of crowdsourcing bicyclist information through interviews and case materials. The final chapter summarizes the findings and implications for practice and research. This dissertation shows that the biased representation of bicycling in these two crowdsourcing cases pose opportunities to identify safer bicycling routes and expand public participation geographies, but could exacerbate problems with aligning public improvements with the users of a specific technological approach. Further, the construct of crowdsourcing for urban planning remains flexible and therefore merits further study and knowledge transfer for practitioners and students.Community and Regional Plannin

Citizen empowerment and innovation in the data-rich city

This book analyzes the ongoing transformation in the “smart city” paradigm and explores the possibilities that technological innovations offer for the effective involvement of ordinary citizens in collective knowledge production and decision-making processes within the context of urban planning and management. To so, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from a range of experts including city managers, public policy makers, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) specialists, and researchers. The first two parts of the book focus on the generation and use of data by citizens, with or without institutional support, and the professional management of data in city governance, highlighting the social connectivity and livability aspects essential to vibrant and healthy urban environments. In turn, the third part presents inspiring case studies that illustrate how data-driven solutions can empower people and improve urban environments, including enhanced sustainability. The book will appeal to all those who are interested in the required transformation in the planning, management, and operations of data-rich cities and the ways in which such cities can employ the latest technologies to use data efficiently, promoting data access, data sharing, and interoperability

Shifting the spotlight: understanding crowdsourcing intermediaries in transparency and accountability initiatives

This report highlights the ideas and practices that underlie the work of crowdsourcing intermediaries: actors who collect and analyse citizen feedback using digital platforms, and use it to support positive change. Most studies of crowdsourcing initiatives in the transparency and accountability field are primarily concerned with representation (whose voice is being heard?) and impact (what kind of change is being supported?). By contrast, this study shifts the spotlight onto crowdsourcing intermediaries themselves, their motives,and their theories of change and action. Key themes covered in the paper are: the role of crowdsourcing intermediaries as gatekeepers of citizen-generated data; the accountability of crowdsourcing intermediaries to citizens who contribute data, especially in terms of data policies; and the factors that influence the pathways of individual crowdsourcing intermediaries.DFIDUSAIDSIDAOmidyar Networ

Using social media and mobile technologies to foster engagement and self-organization in participatory urban planning and neighbourhood governance

This editorial explores the potential of social media and mobile technologies to foster citizen engagement and participation in urban planning. We argue that there is a lot of wishful thinking, but little empirically validated knowledge in this emerging field of study. We outline key developments and pay attention to larger societal and political trends. The aim of this special issue is: 1) To offer a critical state-of-the-art overview of empirical research; and 2) to explore whether social media and mobile technologies have measurable effects on citizens' engagement beyond traditional mobilization and participation tools. We find that wider engagement only ‘materializes’ if virtual connections also manifest themselves in real space through concrete actions, by using both online and offline engagement tools. Another requirement is that planners do not seek to marginalize dissenting voices in order to promote the interests of powerful developers.PostprintPeer reviewe

Democracy Models and Civic Technologies: Tensions, Trilemmas, and Trade-offs

This paper aims at connecting democratic theory with civic technologies in order to highlight the links between some theoretical tensions and trilemmas and design trade-offs. First, it reviews some tensions and trilemmas raised by political philosophers and democratic theorists. Second, it considers both the role and the limitations of civic technologies in mitigating these tensions and trilemmas. Third, it proposes to adopt a meso-level approach, in between the macro-level of democratic theories and the micro-level of tools, to situate the interplay between people, digital technologies, and data.Comment: Workshop on 'Linked Democracy: AI for Democratic Innovation' (IJCAI2017), Melbourne, August 19, 201

Self-tracking modes: reflexive self-monitoring and data practices

The concept of ‘self-tracking’ (also referred to as life-logging, the quantified self, personal analytics and personal informatics) has recently begun to emerge in discussions of ways in which people can voluntarily monitor and record specific features of their lives, often using digital technologies. There is evidence that the personal data that are derived from individuals engaging in such reflexive self-monitoring are now beginning to be used by actors, agencies and organisations beyond the personal and privatised realm. Self-tracking rationales and sites are proliferating as part of a ‘function creep’ of the technology and ethos of self-tracking. The detail offered by these data on individuals and the growing commodification and commercial value of digital data have led government, managerial and commercial enterprises to explore ways of appropriating self-tracking for their own purposes. In some contexts people are encouraged, ‘nudged’, obliged or coerced into using digital devices to produce personal data which are then used by others. This paper examines these issues, outlining five modes of self-tracking that have emerged: private, communal, pushed, imposed and exploited. The analysis draws upon theoretical perspectives on concepts of selfhood, citizenship, biopolitics and data practices and assemblages in discussing the wider sociocultural implications of the emergence and development of these modes of self-tracking