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

Sacred Civics

Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature. The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love—matters. Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities

Building collaborative platforms for urban innovation: Newcastle City Futures as a quadruple helix intermediary

There is a growing academic and policy interest in the notion of using cities as ‘living laboratories’ to develop and test responses to the social, environmental, and economic challenges present in contemporary urbanism. These living laboratories are often assumed to function through ‘quadruple helix’ relations between varied actors from the public, private, university, and community sectors. However, empirical research that explores the real-world functioning of these arrangements is comparatively limited. This paper will help address this gap through the case of Newcastle City Futures (NCF) – a university-anchored platform for collaborative urban foresight research, public engagement, and innovation. In particular, the paper will concentrate on a two year period when NCF focused on the facilitation of innovation demonstrator projects guided by the vision of Newcastle upon Tyne developing a post-industrial future as a ‘test-bed city’. Detailed empirical accounts of the development of two demonstrator projects are used to illustrate and analyse processes of cross-sectoral collaboration and engaging the public in co-design. These are used to support the conceptual argument that the presence of the quadruple helix as a form of local innovation system should not be taken as given. Instead the collaborative relationships required for transformational interventions in the future of cities need to be actively constructed by diverse actors and supported by intermediary vehicles such as NCF

Sacred Civics

Sacred Civics argues that societal transformation requires that spirituality and sacred values are essential to reimagining patterns of how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and with nature. The book brings together transdisciplinary and global academics, professionals, and activists from a range of backgrounds to question assumptions that are fused deep into the code of how societies operate, and to draw on extraordinary wisdom from ancient Indigenous traditions; to social and political movements like Black Lives Matter, the commons, and wellbeing economies; to technologies for participatory futures where people collaborate to reimagine and change culture. Looking at cities and human settlements as the sites of transformation, the book focuses on values, commons, and wisdom to demonstrate that how we choose to live together, to recognize interdependencies, to build, grow, create, and love—matters. Using multiple methodologies to integrate varied knowledge forms and practices, this truly ground-breaking volume includes contributions from renowned and rising voices. Sacred Civics is a must-read for anyone interested in intersectional discussions on social justice, inclusivity, participatory design, healthy communities, and future cities

Problematising Civil Society- on What Terrain Does Xenophobia Flourish

Is there a need to reconceptualise civil society organisations (CSOs) given the fragmented, uneven, varied and sometimes contradictory responses of CSOs to the May 2008 violence

Building a Curriculum for Formalized Planning Courses in High Schools

This document provides a justification, framework, and formalized six-unit curriculum for bringing an introductory planning course into the high school system. It outlines the process for adapting the basic concepts of a planning education for grades 9-12 and builds upon the NC Department of Curriculum and Instruction's standard courses of study in social studies to align the proposed curriculum in planning with the existing high school social studies structure. The units begin with a history of the planning profession, transition into key issues within planning that affect the lives of every American and concludes with looking forward into the future of city planning in the US.Master of City and Regional Plannin

AHRC Challenges of the Future: Public Services

This report addresses the state of UK university-led design research in the context of public services. It identifies centres of excellence and their supporting infrastructure and maps the research landscape through a review of projects and research centres. It presents salient themes, questions and approaches within practice and details the role that design research may play in the future of public service research and innovation. Reviewing the innovative capacity of design research undertaken in the public service context, it looks at the methods, strategies and skills that afford this capacity. It identifies developmental opportunities to support further work in this context andprovides insight into future collaborations, partnerships and consortia to support activity and drive co-investment between academia, government and industry. The report aims to: •Increase awareness of how design creates high-level societal and economic benefit in the public service context. •Understand how academic design research functions strategically and how it is operationalised within this context. •Understand how university collaborations are critically important in supporting innovationwithin this context. •Understand how collaborations are initiated and sustained to add social and economic value. The research was conducted from March to June 2020 and complements five other AHRC fellowships focused on design research for place, future mobility,artificial intelligence, clean growth and policy. Reflecting its long-standing support of design research, AHRC appointed 5 Design Research Fellows. These short-term, intensive Fellowships were aimed at assessing the value of UK university-led design research to the UK’s industrial strategy

Citizenship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Selective Bibliography, 2000-2009

Citizenship in the Humanities and Social Sciences is a selective bibliography consisting of citations to works published during the years 2000-2009 on citizenship-related topics in the humanities and social sciences. Primarily consisting of books/chapters and scholarly journal articles, the bibliography also includes other materials (case studies, reports, dissertations, and working papers) for which scholarship, authority and relevance have been established. Most cited works are published in the English language, although articles published in other languages using a Latin alphabet are also included. Citations were retrieved during January-March 2010 from a variety of aggregated databases accessed through the Wayne State University Library System, including ProQuest, EbscoHost, and WorldCat. This bibliography was prepared for the Center for the Study of Citizenship, Wayne State University. The bibliography is compiled by the students enrolled in the Advanced Online Searching (LIS 7160) class in the Winter 2010 semester at the School of Library and Information Science, Wayne State University