Reimagining the role of citizens in Smart City projects

The technological focus of many Smart City projects relies on top-down innovations, ignoring the role that citizens can play in improving their local communities. In this paper we outline our approach to supporting citizens in playing an active role in urban innovation, from the crowdsourcing of initial ideas through to facilitating citizen involvement in the realization of community projects. This extends previous work in the field by exploring how to go beyond identifying issues and ideas to securing a commitment from citizens to assisting a project intended to address an identified issue

Decoloniality, Inclusivity And Autonomy In Reimagining Cities Of The Future

African Union has hope for a vision of an Africa that is thriving by 2063 (UNDP Africa, 2017). Historically Africa was under the gaze and submissive to the imaginings of western vision. Africans as drivers of development prove to be difficult as global coloniality continues to shape inclusivity, autonomy, and spatial activities. Reimagining the future of cities is aligned with the way global coloniality unpacks how modernisation takes place. Decoloniality becomes important in that it gives Africans the space to think about autonomy to plan how can issues of inclusivity be addressed in the context of providing sustainable cities in line with spatial justice. The main drivers of reimagining the cities of the future are environmental sustainability and disruptive technology. Environmental sustainability and technological vision/disruptive technology are very problematic in the African context. In the African context, environmental issues are secondary as social inequalities and political issues are at the forefront of African lived experiences. Technology although present continues to exacerbate the gap between the “haves and the have nots”. This paper critically explores the future of cities concerning decoloniality, inclusivity and autonomy. It highlights key discussions about decoloniality and helps to unpack an African perspective towards reimagining future cities. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the forefront what sustainability means for smart cities in Africa, and if they are ready to take on an autonomous role in defining the future of cities

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

Vienna 2025 - Growing Through More Sustainability, More Open-Mindedness and Participation

Heading towards the 2 million mark Vienna, a green and social city with a high quality of life, has embarked upon a joint venture between administration, politics and citizens. Numerous programmes, initiatives and projects are supporting this development, making Vienna more sustainable, open and participatory step by step

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

GeoCoin:supporting ideation and collaborative design with location-based smart contracts

Design and HCI researchers are increasingly working with complex digital infrastructures, such as cryptocurrencies, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. These technologies will have a profound impact on digital systems and their audiences. However, given their emergent nature and technical complexity, involving non-specialists in the design of applications that employ these technologies is challenging. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and present GeoCoin, a location-based platform for embodied learning and speculative ideating with smart contracts. In collaborative workshops with GeoCoin, participants engaged with location-based smart contracts, using the platform to explore digital `debit' and `credit' zones in the city. These exercises led to the design of diverse distributed-ledger applications, for time-limited financial unions, participatory budgeting, and humanitarian aid. These results contribute to the HCI community by demonstrating how an experiential prototype can support understanding of the complexities behind new digital infrastructures and facilitate participant engagement in ideation and design processes

Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India's smart urban age

This paper examines the ‘future’ as a blueprint for social power relations in postcolonial urbanism. It addresses a crucial gap in the rich scholarship on postcolonial urbanism that has largely ignored the ‘centrality of time’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) in the politics and speed of urban transformations. This paper takes postcolonial urbanism as a ‘colonisation of/with time’ (Adam, 2004) that reaches across spaces, scales and times of the past, present and future to produce cities as spatio-temporal entities. Using the lens of ‘futuring’ (Urry, 2016) as a practice of imagining and governing cities through speed, this paper analyses India’s national 100 Smart Cities Mission through a set of popular myths that create a dialectic relation between past and future. It suggests that smart cities in India are marked by the deployment of two parallel mythologies of speed – nationhood and technology. While the former refers to a mythical moral state, the latter refers to transparent and accountable governance in order to produce smart cities in the image of the moral state. The paper concludes that while postcolonial future time is imagined at the scale of the smart city, there is a simultaneous recalibration of its governance at the scale of the nation

Urban Data in the primary classroom: bringing data literacy to the UK curriculum

As data becomes established as part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in schools using real life, complex, urban data sets collected as part of a smart city project. The approach is founded on the premise that young learners have the ability to work with complex data sets if they are supported in the right way and if the tasks are grounded in a real life context. Narrative principles are used to frame the task, to assist interpretation and tell stories from data and to structure queries of datasets. An inquiry-based methodology organises the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK primary school in which twelve students aged 9-10 years learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, by interpreting existing visualisations of smart meter data and data obtained from aerial survey. Additional trials are scheduled with older learners which will evaluate learners on more challenging data handling tasks. The trials are informing the development of the Urban Data School, a web-based platform designed to support teaching data skills in schools in order to improve data literacy among school leavers

Creating an Understanding of Data Literacy for a Data-driven Society

Society has become increasingly reliant on data, making it necessary to ensure that all citizens are equipped with the skills needed to be data literate. We argue that the foundations for a data literate society begin by acquiring key data literacy competences in school. However, as yet there is no clear definition of what these should be. This paper explores the different perspectives currently offered on both data and statistical literacy and then critically examines to what extent these address the data literacy needs of citizens in today’s society. We survey existing approaches to teaching data literacy in schools, to identify how data literacy is interpreted in practice. Based on these analyses, we propose a definition of data literacy that is focused on employing an inquiry-based approach to using data to understand real world phenomena. The contribution of this paper is the creation of a common foundation for teaching and learning data literacy skills