Exploring Community Needs for Disaster Shelters Using Cultural Probes

During disasters, emergency shelters play a central role in emergency management, providing both a secure environment and centralized sites for the distribution of information, material relief supplies, and access to health and human services. Despite their importance, challenges such as physical access, public awareness, and peoples’ willingness to relocate limit the impact of both shelters managed by emergency responders and informal locations created by affected communities. This paper presents research conducted as part of a long-term project aimed at designing digital tools to assist communities and formal responders plan and manage emergency shelters. Working with partners in Puerto Rico, we developed and distributed cultural probes in three communities with recent experience of hurricanes and earthquakes to better understand the needs and resources of disaster affected people related to shelter. This approach yielded novel insights that challenge and expand traditional views of emergency shelters and identified several areas where HCI research and design can contribute to the sector

Discourse, Materiality, and the Users of Mobile Health Technologies: A Nigerian Case Study

mHealth, which is the use of mobile phones and other handheld information and communication technologies (ICTs), has been increasingly advocated as the solution to the problems, primarily infrastructure and personnel, facing the healthcare sector of many low-to-lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). Following a series of United Nations Foundation research and advisory publications (in 2012, 2014 and 2016) arguing that mobile phones are approaching ubiquity in Nigeria and across the world, the UN strongly recommended that LMICs undertake mHealth initiatives. Subsequently, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) published a National Health ICT Strategic Framework (Strategic Framework), 2015-2020; the rallying call of this document is that “Health ICTs will deliver universal healthcare [in Nigeria] by 2020.” The document takes a techno-optimistic position that celebrates and advocates for the creation of mHealth technologies, yet it fails to acknowledge the dire lack of the basic, necessary infrastructures for such electronic health systems, particularly in rural areas, including a scarcity of reliable electrical systems or the trained personnel who would understand how to use such technologies. This creates and sustains a healthcare precarity for poor and rural Nigerians. The rhetoric of health and medicine has taken up precarity as a framework for understanding how modern discourses contribute to the material positioning of humans with respect to technological systems. Using material-discursive critique and precarity as analytical frameworks, I tie the history of western medicine in Nigeria to the prevailing top-down approach which created widespread healthcare deserts. Using Critical (Policy) Discourse Analysis, I also examine discursive positioning of agents, e.g., “stakeholders” in the Strategic Framework and “heroes” in an mHealth technology developed and advertised locally in Nigeria, to reveal how policy documents and popular advertisements around mHealth are manipulated to camouflage these healthcare deserts with techno-optimistic rhetoric. Only when we address both the actual material conditions and the rhetorical and linguistic silencing of the people in these rural or poor areas will we be able to approach the promised benefits of mHealth systems in universal healthcare

A Capabilitarian Account of the Potential of Mobile Money for Rural Poverty Reduction in Bauchi, Northern Nigeria

The concept of financial inclusion is partly about empowering underserved or unserved individuals with options to engage within a financial system. With the advent of mobile-money, many people living in rural and cash economies can use their mobile phones to access nontraditional means of banking. The ability to use mobile phones for payment and remittance purposes has changed the ways mobile phones and banking are used, because of the opportunity offered to underbanked and unbanked populations in many developing countries. Although there is an increasing amount of research in this area, studies relating mobile money to human development, and more specifically to rural poverty as ‘capability deprivation’ are limited. The capability approach has in recent decades emerged as a theoretical framework for understanding poverty, justice, inequality and human development. Although the approach has been extensively operationalised in varied contexts, there remains scarce overt interaction between the capability approach and the branch of research focused on assessing information and communications technology (ICT) for advancing human development. The capability approach is operationalised here to examine the transformative potential of ICTs in human development. In particular, the study assesses the effect of mobile-money on human capabilities of poor and rural individuals in Bauchi State, Northern Nigeria. Research insights are thus used to produce a capabilitarian account through which mobilemoney is evaluated in terms of its ability to expand or obstruct people’s valued human capabilities to achieve their ideas of ’the good’. Secondary evidence synthesised with empirical discoveries suggest that mobile-money is valuable if the range of financial services allow poor people to pursue their wellbeing goals by serving primarily as a savings platform and a facilitator of quick and dependable payments and transfers. While a proportion of rural populations are included (through capability expansion) in the mobile-money ecosystem, some remain inevitably excluded (through capability obstruction), and therefore still deprived in terms of their capabilities as a result of mobile-money. In conclusion, challenges relating to accessibility, affordability and awareness need to be adequately addressed in order for mobile-money to attain its transformative potential of reducing rural poverty. By exploring how mobile-money plays a role in enhancing or obstructing human capabilities, this study demonstrates that the capability approach lends itself to making a more robust analysis that allows a theorisation of the link between ICTs and human development

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Urban Sustainability and Justice

Urban Sustainability and Justice presents an innovative yet practical approach to incorporate equity and social justice into sustainable development in urban areas, in line with the commitments of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. This open access work proposes a feminist reading of just sustainabilities' principles to reclaim sustainability as a progressive discourse which informs action on the ground. This work will help the committed activist (whether they are on the ground, working in a community, in a non-governmental organization (NGO), in a business, at a university, in any sphere in government) to connect their work to international efforts to deliver environmental justice in cities around the world. Drawing on a comparative, international analysis of sustainability initiatives in over 200 cities, Castán Broto and Westman find limited evidence of the implementation of just sustainabilities principles in practice, but they argue that there is considerable potential to develop a justice-oriented sustainability agenda. Highlighting current successes while also assessing prospects for the future, the authors show that just sustainabilities is not merely an aspirational discourse, but a frame of reference to support radical action on the ground. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Sheffield

Urban Sustainability and Justice

Urban Sustainability and Justice presents an innovative yet practical approach to incorporate equity and social justice into sustainable development in urban areas, in line with the commitments of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. This open access work proposes a feminist reading of just sustainabilities' principles to reclaim sustainability as a progressive discourse which informs action on the ground. This work will help the committed activist (whether they are on the ground, working in a community, in a non-governmental organization (NGO), in a business, at a university, in any sphere in government) to connect their work to international efforts to deliver environmental justice in cities around the world. Drawing on a comparative, international analysis of sustainability initiatives in over 200 cities, Castán Broto and Westman find limited evidence of the implementation of just sustainabilities principles in practice, but they argue that there is considerable potential to develop a justice-oriented sustainability agenda. Highlighting current successes while also assessing prospects for the future, the authors show that just sustainabilities is not merely an aspirational discourse, but a frame of reference to support radical action on the ground. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Sheffield

Neglect and Allure: Gentrification of the Concrete Utopia

New Belgrade blocks have a contradictory reputation. On the one hand, they are large housing estates constructed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, lacking maintenance over the past half-century. Due to the giveaway privatization of the public housing stock, limited capacity of public utilities and the unresolved status of open block spaces, the dwelling units, common areas and the public spaces within the estates have been poorly maintained. The ageing buildings have leaky roofs, flooded basements, and deteriorating thermal insulation. Nevertheless, despite these drawbacks and the long-standing portrayal of a "concrete ghetto" in Serbian cinema, New Belgrade still is a desirable place to live. Based on the ethnographic study of two residential blocks, this paper delves into the contentious realm of urban transformation, focusing on the gentrification process in New Belgrade. Through a meticulous ethnographic exploration conducted between May 2020 and December 2021, this research sheds light on the complexities of "soft" gentrification and offers insights into the lived realities of young professional parents. This paper suggests that the YUPPS, attracted by the architectural value and infrastructural qualities of the socialist-modernist housing estates, are affluent in both the economic and the social capital and thus represent the forerunners of the gentrification process in New Belgrade. Furthermore, by analyzing the transformation of public spaces, the research uncovers the growing trend of childification, reflecting the new values and preferences of the emerging creative and technocratic middle-class residents that displace poor homeowners of the socialist-middle class. In summary, the paper argues that New Belgrade, although gentrified, is still living up to its founding ideal of becoming a family-friendly middle-class utopia. By emphasizing these insights, this paper contributes to the broader discourse on gentrification, urban transformation, and the complexities of class dynamics in post-transitional cities

Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development Communities in the South (Final Report)

Daniel Miller, Andrew Skuse, Don Slater, Jo Tacchi Tripta Chandola, Thomas Cousins, Heather Horst, Janet Kwam