Shetty Pooja. (2015) Participatory Budgeting in Pune City: A mirage!. In J. Condie and A. M. Cooper (Eds.) Dialogues of Sustainable Urbanisation: Social Science Research and Transitions to Urban Contexts, Penrith: University of Western Sydney. (original) (raw)
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Academic blogging has typically been a form of digital scholarship that is under-utilized in academia. Although there are both costs and benefits to blogging at different stages in an academic's career, blogs can provide a rewarding platform for bringing research and academic perspectives to a wide-reaching and broader audience. This note explores the different experiences of each of the co-authors in terms of using blogs for their scholarly communication. The experiences and lessons gained are of particular relevance to urban planners, sociologists, and anthropologists, who study the social, economic, and historical elements of the city. The findings suggest that the motivations and approaches of scholarly blogging are diverse but overall add value to the academic community. Moreover, each testimony in this note provides examples of the benefits of blogging for research, collaboration, and engagement.
'Urban Change in Global Perspective: Principles for Re-Making our Cities' (2016)
Globalization, Modernity and Urban Change in Asian Cities, 2016
Cities have always been important to processes of globalization and global change, past and present. Cities were the loci of empires, at least going back to the period when the Romans declared urbis et orbis — the City of Rome and the Orb of the World are one. In the sixteenth century the City of Seville witnessed the return of the sailing vessel Victoria, carrying the first humans to circumnavigate the globe. From the nineteenth century to early twentieth century, the City of London was the centre of an empire that colonized more than a quarter of the total land-area of the earth. Following the Spanish Empire's use of the same epithet, London described itself as the metropole of an empire upon which the sun never set. While some writers give the impression that 'global cities' are a twentieth-century phenomenon and the movement of finance capital predominantly defines their global status, the globalization of all cities has been intensifying across a very long history. Nevertheless, while globalization and urbanization have been intertwined for centuries, there are a number of changes that suggest a qualitative shift across the last four or five decades. All of these developments have had a profound effect on social life. In this paper I want to examine each of these four domains of social life a little more closely and show that in each case there are no simple answers. Rather we are confronted by paradoxes, quandaries and cross-cutting challenges that require a different way of thinking about alternatives. First I want to draw out a few of these paradoxes. I will then use the same approach to suggest an integrated set of principles for making better cities. The approach taken here is called ‘Engaged Research’. It takes seriously the idea that social life is multifarious and cannot be reduced to the dominance of economic considerations nor to global imperatives. Because social life is complex, layered and changing, engaged research involves long-term exploration of the intersections of various conjunctural and contingent conditions of existence—cultural, economic, political and ecological.
We hear you! The unheard, marginalised and excluded: Power and cities
2021
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Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference on - British HCI '15, 2015
This paper is an output of a two day 'Festival Lab' held at the Future Everything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 2015. The Festival Lab invited a team of academic researchers to develop a model of public engagement during the festival that would explore specific research questions around mobility, data awareness, and civic engagement. From this brief the academic team developed the Festival Lab 'PuBLiC', and created an activity arc that involved participants borrowing bicycles and responding to structured and unstructured research questions about the future of cycling and data use in the city of Manchester. Equipped with iPhones with bespoke software for collecting short textual comments, photographs and GPS data, participants became integral actors in one-day field studies, taking the role of both subjects and authors of this paper. We present findings and observations noted by participants and researchers, discussing the significance of these as triangulated in a closing workshop plenary session. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the paper creation process itself, a collaborative, intensive, fast-paced approach that challenges the very framework of academic authority and public engagement.