77 research outputs found

    Greening Cities Shaping Cities

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    The topic of pinpointing Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in the urban context has been cultivating interest lately from different scholars, urban planning practitioners and policymakers. This Special Issue originates from the Greening Cities Shaping Cities Symposium held at the Politecnico di Milano (12–13 October 2020), aiming at bridging the gap between the science and practice of implementing NBS in the built environment, as well as highlighting the importance of citizen participation in shared governance and policy making. The Special Issue received contributions from all over the world, from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Brazil, Portugal, Denmark, France, Bulgaria, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, the UAE, the UK, and the USA

    An Empty Promise? Digital Democracy in the Smart City

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    The digital transformation affects every part of our societies and everyday lives, including the processes and structures of our democracies. On the one hand, information and communication technologies have the potential to lower the threshold for political communication and participation. On the other hand, they can be used for large-scale data collection and surveillance, posing a risk to the public sphere. This thesis investigates the impact of digitization on the legitimacy of democracy. It first develops a novel framework based on the theories of participatory and deliberative democracy, drawing on recent work on deliberative systems. On this basis, digital democracy is examined as a system, consisting of different engagement spaces and actors within the smart city. The smart city is a particularly fruitful testbed for digital democracy as it is based on the promise of applying a high density of digital technologies to facilitate civic participation as well as better service delivery and governance. Through an in-depth case study of the smart city of Amsterdam, this thesis not only reveals the legitimacy dilemmas of digital democracy in the smart city, but also illustrates the limits of applying participatorydeliberative systems theory on a digital democracy ecosystem. The analysis demonstrates design conflicts between different online engagement platforms within the digital democracy system, as well as conflicting objectives among the actors behind them. The findings do not support the claim that digitization negatively impacts democracy’s legitimacy in the smart city of Amsterdam through marketization, large-scale data collection, and surveillance, as some authors warn. However, a significant positive impact of digitization on democratic legitimacy, through higher levels of inclusiveness, empowerment, or civic influence, is also not confirmed. The findings show that digital technologies’ promise of facilitating large-scale citizen participation and deliberation in the smart city does not live up to the normative ideal. The results from Amsterdam are exposed to smart city and digital democracy experts across the globe to test their generalizability, demonstrating that, despite its shortcomings, Amsterdam’s extensive digital democracy system is far advanced in international comparison. What may appear a contradiction in fact illustrates that we are still in the early stages of development, with potential to enhance the legitimacy of digital democracy, both in the smart city of Amsterdam and beyond

    Digital participation in the VisLab: Sketching urban visions for the harbour of Lachen (Switzerland) online

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    For decades, citizen participation has been recognised as a crucial part of urban planning. Simultaneously, as our everyday life become more digital, digital tools are being increasingly used in the involvement of citizens and their perspectives on urban issues. In particular, 3D visualisation tools based on point cloud visualisations may have the potential to further enhance opportunities for citizen participation digitally. Yet, research on their application in digital participation processes has been limited. Therefore, this study attempts to bridge this gap by developing the Urban Sketch Tool (UST) and initiating a digital participation process VisLab with local stakeholders in Lachen (Switzerland). The aim was to investigate how the UST facilitates the sketching of urban visions for the harbour of Lachen, and how it supports a discussion between stakeholders. Furthermore, how stakeholders discuss their urban visions and whether they reach consensus or dissent was examined. The study’s findings indicate that the Urban Sketch Tool is simple to use and allows for the sketching of urban visions, which facilitates discussion about urban issues by providing a common language for participants. With regard to the stakeholder discussion, the results suggest that the stakeholder mainly reach consensus through an exchange of knowledge and perspectives. However, dissent rarely occurs, because participants tend to avoid conflict or shift their opinion toward consensus. Notably, the current findings do indicate some limitations associated with the use of the UST and digital participation. As it turns out, the UST and digital access to participation may introduce new barriers, particularly for stakeholder who experience technical difficulties during the process or have a deficiency in digital skills. This results in the exclusion of individuals and unequal access to the digital participation process, resulting in unbalanced outcomes. Thus, it is recommended that digital tools be developed for those who face the greatest barriers to digital participation in planning. Additionally, it is advised that in digital participation, particular attention is being paid to conflict and the voices of marginalised participants. Finally, it can be concluded that digital participation and digital tools such as the UST such as the UST should not replace more traditional forms of participation, but rather complement them and thereby enable them to reach their full potential

    Greening Cities Shaping Cities: Pinpointing Nature-Based Solutions in Cities between Shared Governance and Citizen Participation

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    The topic of pinpointing Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in the urban context has been cultivating interests lately from different scholars, urban planning practitioners and policymakers. This Special Issue originates from the Greening Cities Shaping Cities Symposium held at the Politecnico di Milano (12–13 October 2020), aiming at bridging the gap between the science and practice of implementing NBS in the built environment, as well as highlighting the importance of citizen participation in shared governance and policy making. The Special Issue was also made open to other contributions from outside the symposium in order to allow for contributions from a major scientific and practical audience wherever possible. Indeed, we have gathered contributions from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Brazil, Portugal, Denmark, France, Bulgaria, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, the UAE, the UK, and the USA

    When open-meets-digital: GOV.uk info-attention marketplace, actionable UK government priorities and agenda-attention

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    Social scientists have tried to decode institutional and societal priorities for decades – which issues/events/countries attract attention and how long they maintain their actionable agenda status. One of the reoccurring challenges in the process was the lack of accessible, standardised, and comparable data, especially when trying to identify government priorities and measure policy/public agenda-attention. However, as the adoption of web-based technology changes how government communicates and engages citizens, our ability to access open-digital information and make more accurate agenda observations has improved. As the role of centralised government portals expands, so is the need to examine how this ‘Open-Information meets Digital Attention’ nexus can help us identify actionable government priorities, improve our understanding of how issues are (re)prioritised and how those agenda-attention dynamics change over time. We consider the launch of GOV.uk in 2012 to be highly relevant for this research. Thanks to the portal’s centralised knowledge management system, standardised organisational typology, and uninformed search filters, we can now access new data, observe users’ preferences, and repurpose government information to establish associations between 357 departments/agencies, 47 policy areas, 219 policies, 49 topical events and 237 locations. The premise of this thesis is to examine the untapped potential of centralised government portals for agenda-attention research. We want to know if portals like GOV.uk can unlock alternative agenda-perspectives and data sources that can be aligned with existing theoretical frameworks as we seek to bridge a gap between theory and practice? We address this issue by contextualising GOV.uk as an ‘InfoAttention Marketplace’ – to be observed as a space where a Supply of digitised government information meets a digital footprint of users’ Demand for open data. In the process, we have used published government ‘info-flows’ to establish institutional preferences and the ‘pageview’ analytics to define public attentiveness for actionable government priorities over six years (10.05.2010 – 10.05.2016). Finally, we were able to demonstrate the applicability and resourcefulness of a centralised government portal for the agenda-attention research by (1) mapping out the UK Policy Platform and identifying the actionable government priorities; (2) computing policy/public agenda-attention frequency; (3) observing Aggregated-Coordinative-Communicative agenda-attention perspectives; (4) establishing a ranking order of institutional preferences along the Agenda-Attention Continuum; and (5) detecting the level of (miss)alignment between policy and public agendas when ‘Supply-meets-Demand’ on the GOV.uk platform. Norderland, Miran Andreas (2022) When Open-meets-Digital: GOV.uk platfor

    An ecosystem inspired framework for digital government transformation

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    Traditional e-government and Digital Government Transformation (DGT) initiatives are often focused on technology transformation and business-IT alignment with the attempt to make government more efficient, transparent and easier to operate within. However, billions of public funding has been spent on those initiatives with very few anticipated benefits yielded. This thesis asserts that DGT will bring about true government transformation when business, people and culture are considered together. Many existing business/industry frameworks, architectures and best practices in the literature for DGT projects address only one or two of those dimensions. To focus on the development and delivery of transformational changes in DGT initiatives, this thesis will propose a solution framework for an integrative approach that brings about business transformation, technology transformation, with people-stakeholder-leadership oriented cultural transformation to form a holistic methodology framework for DGT that is beyond technology alone and will illuminate the road to success in DGT executions. This thesis will provide an ecosystem inspired framework together with tools and maturity model framework to guide a government-wide successful execution of the DGT journey that is iterative, measurable and with consideration of all aspects of business, technology and people. This thesis will approach DGT journeys by: 1. Implementing of a holistic framework to guide the DGT; 2. Considering people and culture for an effective DGT; 3. Providing an integrated approach that can bring innovative knowledge and cultural transformation together with the technology transformation; and by 4. Providing a measurement framework and metrics to guide the maturity of DGT projects. This thesis will be evaluated through four case studies including public sector, the defence force, and health ecosystems and is aimed at supporting public entities for better utilisation of resources, modernising operations, displaying better use of public funds, keeping trust high, saving time, offering fast learning, and better engagement and services for its stakeholders both internally and externally

    Transparenz öffentlicher Einkaufsdaten in Deutschland

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    In dieser Open-Access-Publikation beschreibt Britta Reuter auf Basis einer umfassenden Analyse der internationalen Forschungsergebnisse rund um die Öffnung öffentlicher Verwaltungs- und Einkaufsdaten sowie einer empirischen Erhebung die Chancen und Limitationen der Transparenz des öffentlichen Einkaufs fĂŒr die verschiedenen Akteure aus Verwaltung, Politik, Wirtschaft, Wissenschaft, Medien und Nichtregierungsorganisationen in Deutschland. Sie leitet konkrete Anforderungen und Handlungsfelder ab, mit denen die Mehrwerte einer Öffnung gehoben und ihre Risiken adressiert werden können. Internationale Best Practices runden dieses Buch mit vielseitigen praktischen Anregungen fĂŒr eine offene Beschaffungs- und Vergabepolitik ab

    Optimization for Decision Making II

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    In the current context of the electronic governance of society, both administrations and citizens are demanding the greater participation of all the actors involved in the decision-making process relative to the governance of society. This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled “Optimization for Decision Making II”. These works give an appropriate response to the new challenges raised, the decision-making process can be done by applying different methods and tools, as well as using different objectives. In real-life problems, the formulation of decision-making problems and the application of optimization techniques to support decisions are particularly complex and a wide range of optimization techniques and methodologies are used to minimize risks, improve quality in making decisions or, in general, to solve problems. In addition, a sensitivity or robustness analysis should be done to validate/analyze the influence of uncertainty regarding decision-making. This book brings together a collection of inter-/multi-disciplinary works applied to the optimization of decision making in a coherent manner
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