The Right to the Sustainable Smart City

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructures. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper contributes to an emerging body of work that seeks to involve citizens in the design of sustainable smart cities, particularly in the context of marginalised and culturally diverse urban communities. We present a study involving co- designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities and discuss three ways in which design can participate in the right to the sustainable smart city through designing for the commons, care, and biocultural diversity

Materials and modes of translation: Re-imagining inclusive “zero”-waste futures

In this paper, we present and reflect upon a creative and participatory approach for engaging citizens in imagining desirable “zero”-waste futures that include different values and perspectives. The approach emerged through a 4-month collaboration involving academic researchers and creative professionals and was prototyped in a formerly industrial neighborhood of Utrecht (het Werkspoorkwartier), currently being developed as a creative circular manufacturing area. With our approach, we inquire into and provide an alternative to predominant technology-centered policy visions, which portray the issues of waste as objective challenges that can be addressed through data-driven technological solutions. Such visions neglect many other perspectives and values, particularly those of citizens that face the issue of waste in everyday life, thus providing only a narrow vision of how the future might look like. To gather and articulate different perspectives on alternative “zero”-waste futures, we focus on citizen-science-inspired and speculative design methods to engage people and stimulate imagining futures that bring to light diverse values and perspectives. In the development of the methods, we work in close collaboration with creative practitioners, both in terms of anchoring the research in a real-world context and in terms of combining our different types of expertise. Reflecting on the project, we discuss the potential of our transdisciplinary approach and the co-produced methods to intervene in how we see and imagine alternative futures. We do so by taking “translation” as an analytical lens to understand how different meanings and visions are created through experiential, material, and affective modes of expression. Specifically, we will analyze the translations that occur in the processes of moving from abstract data to matters of concern, and from desirable futures to actionable presents. Looking at these multiple processes through the lens of translation will serve to investigate how different future imaginaries are generated through different materials and modalities of translation, offering different forms of engagement in shaping inclusive urban futures. Translation here will be conceptualized less as a perfect transference of information and more as an open-ended process of paying attention to different values, and identifying those matters for which to care for in our urban futures

Controversing Datafication through Media Architectures

In this chapter, we discuss a speculative and participatory “media architecture” installation that engages people with the potential impacts of data through speculative future images of the datafied city. The installation was originally conceived as a physical combination of digital media technologies and architectural form—a “media architecture”—that was to be situated in a particular urban setting. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it was produced and tested for an online workshop. It is centered on “design frictions” (Forlano and Mathew, 2014) and processes of controversing (Baibarac-Duignan and de Lange, 2021). Instead of smoothing out tensions through “neutral” data visualizations, controversing centers on opening avenues for meaningful participation around frictions and controversies that arise from the datafication of urban life. The installation represents an instance of how processes of controversing may unfold through digital interfaces. Here, we explore its performative potential to “interface” abstract dimensions of datafication, “translate” them into collective issues of concern, and spark imagination around (un)desirable datafied urban futures

ICTs, data and vulnerable people: a guide for citizens

ICTs, personal data, digital rights, the GDPR, data privacy, online security… these terms, and the concepts behind them, are increasingly common in our lives. Some of us may be familiar with them, but others are less aware of the growing role of ICTs and data in our lives - and the potential risks this creates. These risks are even more pronounced for vulnerable groups in society. People can be vulnerable in different, often overlapping, ways, which place them at a disadvantage to the majority of citizens; Table 3 in this guide presents some of the many forms and causes of vulnerability. As a result, vulnerable people need greater support to navigate the digital world, and to ensure that they are able to exercise their rights. This guide explains where such support can be found, and also answers the following questions: - What are the main ethical and legal issues around ICTs for vulnerable citizens? - Who is vulnerable in Europe? - How do issues around ICTs affect vulnerable people in particular? This guide is a resource for members of vulnerable groups, people who work with vulnerable groups, and citizens more broadly. It is also useful for data controllers1 who collect data about vulnerable citizens. While focused on citizens in Europe, it may be of interest to people in other parts of the world. It forms part of the Citizens’ Information Pack produced by the PANELFIT project, and is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. You are welcome to translate this guide into other languages. Please send us a link to online versions in other languages, so that we can add them to the project website

An \u27Urban Spacebook\u27 : re-mapping the city with mobility practices and experiences

THESIS 10758This thesis argues that urban sustainability cannot be reached without city inhabitants becoming more connected and engaged with their city and participating (inter)actively in planning their environments. It acknowledges that there is a need to do more than just requiring people to change the ways in which they use the city (e.g. switching from car to public transport without necessary infrastructural change); rather, it is considered essential to actively (and creatively) involve people in the process of change, in order for them to make sense of what needs to be changed, why and how

The ‘Urban Spacebook’ experimental process: Co-designing a Platform for Participation

This article presents an experimental co-design approach carried out in Dublin, Ireland, which expands user participation to the design of digital technology employed in participatory e-planning initiatives. The approach focuses on city inhabitants’ everyday life experiences of urban space, uses a dynamic mobility lens and includes three spatial/technological experiments. This innovative co-design process informs an ICTs prototype platform for participation entitled ‘Urban Spacebook’. The platform provides viable opportunities for sharing everyday life experiences of urban space and also for enhancing the co-governance of such spaces, thus making a significant contribution in the area of participatory e-planning

Controversing the datafied smart city: Conceptualising a ‘making-controversial’ approach to civic engagement

In this paper, we propose the concept of controversing as an approach for engaging citizens in debates around the datafied city and in shaping responsible smart cities that incorporate diverse public values. Controversing addresses the engagement of citizens in discussions about the datafication of urban life by productively deploying controversies around data. Attempts to engage citizens in the smart city frequently involve ‘neutral’ data visualisations aimed at making abstract sociotechnical issues more tangible. In addition, citizens are meant to gather around issues already defined externally by others. Instead, we focus on how people might become engaged and develop the capacity to shape alternative urban futures. We suggest that making controversial apparently less contentious issues in the smart city allows people to identify their own issues, come together temporarily as a public, imagine alternative possibilities and thus develop capacities for action. In this context, controversies can act as agents of change and open up new spaces for participation and action. We develop the notion of controversing as a deliberate strategy of making datafication controversial, and operationalise the term along the dimensions of recontextualisation, meaning-making and agency. We then look at two cases from the mid-sized city of Amersfoort in the Netherlands, first to test the conceptual potential of controversing to expose how frictions shape citizen engagement, and second to analyse how controversing may frame design-oriented methods aimed at involving diverse participants in discussing datafication and defining public values in the datafied smart city