Exploring 311-Driven Changes in City Government

Through a case study of the City of Philadelphia’s 311 service, Philly311, this paper creates new understanding about city-level service integration enabled by a 311 service center, in terms of how the capabilities of 311-enabled service integration influence the city government in both citizen-facing and internal management side. The analysis is based on findings from semi-structured interviews with executives of Philadelphia, staff of Philly311 contact center, and representatives of other departments related to Philly311. The contact center serves for residents, businesses, and visitors as a front line of municipal services. The 311 service enhances transparency and accountability of service delivery by empowering citizens to engage more and easier in their neighborhoods and communities. The 311 service enables the city to gain more efficiency and effectiveness by allocating and using operational resources based on performance data. For that, the 311 center requires interdepartmental collaboration and cooperation in city government

Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them

Erasing Red Lines: Part 3 - Building Community Wealth

Erasing Red Lines of discrimination and inequality from our map is a monumental task that will require transformational systems-change. As community-based organizations are demonstrating the possibilities of alternative systems in specific geographic places, the questions of (1) how to bring those efforts to scale, and (2) how public policies might change in response to the lessons learned from those efforts, require greater attention. Building on the previous installment of this series, this report engages with aspects of these two questions by: (a) further unpacking some of the beliefs, values, and goals that define the current economic system; (b) summarizing and synthesizing selected ideas from the literature to describe mental models that might underwrite a “next system”; and (c) relating a public policy case study from Buffalo, NY, in which a City-run program was redesigned to be a vehicle for bottom-up community empowerment as opposed to a tool for top-down command-and-control. The case study shows how the program redesign implicitly reflects, and explicitly embraces, some of the “next system” mental models that are outlined in the report. For these and other reasons, the program has received (inter)national recognition, and researchers have argued that it might offer budding insights for how local governments can begin reorienting their existing policies away from goals of growth that support the status quo, and toward goals of equity and community wealth-building. The report concludes with a summary of the case study’s practical lessons for policy development moving forward

Utopia and the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

Utopias from ancient times to the present have come and gone. They remain as a part of literary, philosophical and historical texts and communal practices. Yet this subject has never ceased to inspire contemporary minds as well. My aim in this paper is to consider the communities known as favelas that have formed on the edges of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro as a contemporary form of utopian community. The paper begins with a brief analysis of the concept of utopia. Then follows a discussion of the Favela as an urban utopia as seen from the perspective of Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation as represented in his book, The Philosophy of Liberation. The remainder of the paper will consider in what sense the Favela settlements can be understood as a form of utopia. Among additional sources for this paper, I will refer to the research on the favelas by such scholars as Janice Perlman and Catalytic Communities. Other sources will include art projects in the favelas, the novel and film City of God made on site, and photographs of Miguel Rio Branco taken in the Favelas. All of these artists’ representations reflectactual experiences of life in the Favelas. An underlying question throughout will be the role that art might play in understanding utopias

Covering the Syrian conflict : how Middle East reporters deal with challenging situations

Reporters covering the Middle East are often confronted with situations where information is notoriously hard to verify and where confrontations with witnesses' harsh realities can be extraordinarily intense. How does one deal with claims that there are no chemical weapons in Syria, for instance, if no foreign visitors are allowed to enter the neighbourhoods where the attacks allegedly took place? And how far does one go in adopting or contextualizing the story of a crying little girl blaming 'terrorists' for destroying her life if you are taken to her by a regime official, who considers every form of opposition an act of terror? Under such conditions, reporters can hardly rely upon seemingly self-evident routines, nor can they simply revert to general values such as impartiality or bearing witness without much further ado. Instead, they find themselves forced to make judgements on particular situations time and time again. Based on 14 in-depth interviews with Dutch and Flemish reporters covering Syria, this article sets out to identify, first, the challenging situations with which these journalists have been confronted, and second, how they have responded to these challenges through the use of particular professional strategies. To explore these challenges and strategies, the article develops a theoretical and methodological approach centred around situated value judgements

A better life? Migration reproduction and wellbeing in transition

Mainstream theoretical approaches to migration and reproduction in Asia and elsewhere separate questions relating to reproduction from exploration of economic migration, leading to limitations in current understandings. The tendency to see migratory livelihoods in largely productive terms and to conceptualise the reproductive in terms of consequence or constraint neglects the complex inter-linkages between migration and reproduction in the search for a ‘better life’. Addressing these ‘missing links’ involves taking a broader approach to reproductive behaviour that factors in not only sexual relations and reproductive management but also social reproduction, gender relations between men and women and wider well-being. The transitional economies of Vietnam and China have experienced rapid growth in new forms of migration, in particular rural-urban migration that challenge existing presumptions about migration and reproduction. Not only does marriage migration in this context have strong economic dimensions, economic migration also has clear reproductive dimensions. Prevailing policy and popular stereotypes about how migration intersects with reproduction are being undermined by an increasing diversity of migrant strategies for building and sustaining their own families. Moreover existing institutional and policy constraints mean that these strategies often involve difficult and unpalatable trade-offs for individual and family wellbeing. In both countries the remaining household registration system and the related structuring of social entitlements lead to social exclusion of migrants and their families in urban areas, and perpetuate rural-urban inequalities, with outcomes detrimental to the well-being of current and future generations of the migrants who are trying to build livelihoods and meaningful lives

Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics