Smarten Up! Open Data, Toolkits and Participation in the Social City (original) (raw)
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Smarten Up! Open Data, Toolkits and Participatory Governance in the Social City
Communications & Strategies
The current era of austerity is placing increasing pressure on governments everywhere to do more with less, particularly at the local level where government services have the greatest impact on citizens' everyday lives. Thereby the roles of information and communication technologies and citizens are highlighted. This article is designed to yield insights into how local city administrations can facilitate and optimize citizen involvement in the context of the co-production of city services deploying mobile devices. Cities can be seen to open up public data aiming at offering new opportunities for the generation, use and integration of, among others, economic, social and environmental data. They seek to do so via city-hosted toolkits allowing users – which are the most important users of the city's urban environment and generating the most current data and knowledge that may inform and enrich governing practices, such as planning - to develop mobile applications emphasizing local deployment. The analytical framework focuses on the role of the (purposefully) city-provided toolkit and the citizens' capacities to engage in the public domain guided by the Living Lab approach. In doing so, the dynamics between the provided tools (and data) addressing the needs of the city and citizens underpinning citizens' everyday life experience in navigating and appropriating the urban space, are drawn out. The empirical results are used as preliminary evidence to yield a more rounded understanding of co-production of e-government information and services leveraged as a core innovative process, currently being played out, in the city of Athens (Greece) and Ghent (Belgium).
This research is part of the Voice or Chatter? Using Structuration Framework Towards a Theory of ICT Mediated Citizen Engagement research project led by IT for Change and carried on under the Making All Voices Count programme. The research began in May 2016 and is about to end by January 2017. The project consists in analysing several cases of ICT mediated citizen engagement in the world, led by governments with the aim to increase participation in policy affairs. This subproject deals with the case of decidim.Barcelona, an ambitious project by the City Council of Barcelona (Spain) to increase engagement in the design, monitoring and assessment of its strategic plan for 2016-2019. These specific pages focus on the socio-political environment where this subproject takes place, specifically speaking Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain, for the geographical coordinates, and for the temporal coordinates the beginnings of the XXIst century and most especially the aftermath of the May 15, 2011 Spanish Indignados Movement or 15M – with some needed flashbacks to the restauration of Democracy in 1975-1978. The working paper Technopolitics, ICT-based participation in municipalities and the makings of a network of open cities. Drafting the state of the art and the case of decidim.Barcelona, thus, aims at explaining how and why such an ICT-based participation project like decidim.Barcelona could take place in Barcelona in the first months 2016, although it will, of course, relate to the project itself every now and then.
Deciphering Smart City Citizenship: The Techno-Politics of Data and Urban Co-operative Platforms
2020
The hegemonic ‘smart city’ approach in the European H2020 institutional framework is slowly evolving into a new citizen-centric paradigm called the ‘experimental city’. While this evolution incorporates social innovations—including urban co-operative platforms that are flourishing as (smart) citizens are increasingly considered decision-makers rather than data providers—certain underlying ethical and democratic issues concerning the techno-politics of data remain unresolved. To cite this article: Calzada, I. (2018), Deciphering Smart City Citizenship: The Techno-Politics of Data and Urban Co-operative Platforms. RIEV, Revista Internacional de Estudios Vascos/International Journal on Basque Studies 63(1-2):42-81. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24498.35524/6.
2019
This paper focuses on digital platforms supporting citizen participation in the era of Smart Cities. Our study presents and analyses two examples of online participation platforms, implemented by two Walloon cities: Mons and Liège (Belgium). These two cases highlight the differences and the similarities between both cities’ interpretation of digital participation, as well as the difficulties they faced, especially considering the data processing by city officials. In light of the challenges observed through those two cases, we suggest that digital platforms might potentially be misused, and somehow bias the whole digital participatory process. We therefore issue recommendations about how to design, launch and manage such platforms and, moreover, suggest that platforms should be supplemented by other digital or traditional participatory processes in order to reach higher levels of participation. Keywords-citizen participation; digital platform; data processing; Smart City; Belgium.
This section offers a series of joint reflections on (open) data platform from a variety of cases, from cycling, traffic and mapping to activism, environment and data brokering. Data platforms play a key role in contemporary urban governance. Linked to open data initiatives, such platforms are often proposed as both mechanisms for enhancing the accountability of administrations and performing as sites for 'bottom-up' digital invention. Such promises of smooth flows of data, however, rarely materialise unproblematically. The development of data platforms is always situated in legal and administrative cultures, databases are often built according to the standards of existing digital ecologies, access always involves processes of social negotiation, and interfaces (such as sensors) may become objects of public contestation. The following contributions explore the contested and mutable character of open data platforms as part of heterogeneous publics and trace the pathways of data through different knowledge, skills, public and private configurations. They also reflect on the value of STS approaches to highlight issues and tensions as well as to shape design and governance.
(Smart) City and the (Open) Data. A Critical Approach to a Platform-driven Urban Citizenship
Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2020
This paper represents a first attempt to reconstruct a theoretical map of the relation between technology (digital media) and citizenship. We start from the reconstruction of the role of citizens in the smart city paradigm and then face the challenge that the so-called Big Techs move to the ideal of an engaged "smart community" by promoting an individual relationship between users/citizens and digital platforms. Finally, we present two emerging participation paradigms concerning Data Activism and Cooperativism, which seem to represent relevant fields for experiencing (and observing) the agency of a future, networked citizenship.